Halloween Joomla Template – The Making Of

View the Halloween Template Demo

Our Free Halloween Joomla Template is live and the official template page can be found at the previous link. There you will find links to download, source files, documentation of module positions, etc.

The demo site was designed around the idea of a simple Halloween costumes store. I didn’t really get time to flesh out the store with sample products so I hope you will just appreciate the overall aesthetic of the design and then put it to good use in your own projects.

Below is an image of my finished artwork in Adobe Fireworks – everything is on layers so elements can be switched out, edited, etc.

An example of how useful this can be is a quick hue/saturation filter I applied to the background layer, which gives us a really nice alternative effect:

The source files for this project are available to premium Joomlabear members in our downloads area.

I wanted to talk briefly about how I created the artwork and give credit where credit is due.

I’m very proud of the moon – this was created by cutting out an actual photo of a moon and then sitting it over the top of an orange gradient – I then changed the blend mode to Freeze to give a very orange Halloween look.

The font which I used for the logo, and which looks like dripping blood, or something right out of the Rocky Horror Picture Show is called Creepsville. It’s free for any use so you can grab this and make your own logos, etc.

The background was created using Photoshop, I took an image that  had a large amount of the night blue color in the template, and ran a Gaussian blur over it. I then used a number of excellent free photoshop cloud brushes from Qbrushes, and set them to black – overlaying these over my blue background.

The various Halloween icons, such as the Jack-O-Lantern, spider, cat, crow, bats and witch (you did spot the witch didn’t you?) were taken from an excellent Halloween Photoshop brush set from Obsidian Dawn. Love your work guys.

Hope you all enjoy the template! Leave a comment and let me know if you found this useful, and what projects you are using the template on.

New Notebook Style Joomla Template

Hi All,

We’ve been very busy working on a number of updates to joomlabear.com, and among the good things coming are two new templates.

The first one will be uploaded as a beta later today for members (I will still be tweaking and improving it for a little while).

It’s a notebook style joomla template with a torn edge look, simple and to the point with nice typography.

I’ve created a dedicated demo site for the template and picked a theme of healthy eating recipes as a starting point. I like doing this because starting with a theme for the site makes it a lot easier to find design inspiration for the overall look and feel. The idea is that the template is flexible and you can use the notebook base with any site theme – just use a different feature image( top left) and your own background image.

The demo site is adsense optimized, and you should see good click through rates using this layout with your own projects.

I plan on releasing a number of themes for the notebook look – the first one is good for cooking, restaurant or and food themed Joomla site.

New Joomla Templates Site Live Now – Give Me Feedback

This will be a short post as I’m absolutely knackered.

After literally months of work in-between client projects, and probably 160 hours of work I have finally made the new Joomla Bear Joomla Templates site live.

I still have some bugs to iron out and a few things that could do with a bit of a tidy up – but overall I think it’s one of the most interesting and creative sites I’ve ever built.

A bit of a run down on my process and plugins/extensions used will follow in the next few days.

Also the template I built for the new Joomla Template portal lays the groundwork for the next template release something for the punters to look forward to.

Leave me your thoughts on the website.

Cheers

Should I Use Joomla Or Wordpress?

Now I could be wrong about this but I believe there are two groups of people who read this blog. There are those who are interested in Joomla Templates, and have arrived from the main site. And those who have come from search engines or from some of the niche marketing circles I have been frequenting.

If  you are part of the first group, those who love Joomla, own a Joomla website, or want to build a Joomla website then you may be wondering what this blog is based on. Yes you probably guessed correctly, it’s WordPress.

I am big fan of Joomla and I believe it is an excellent choice for many types of websites, but I also believe that you should pick your CMS based on what you intend to use it for and what you want to achieve.

WordPress is an excellent framework to quickly publish your thoughts and ideas to the web and I’ve chosen it for the JoomlaBear blog because I believe it is the most efficient tool for my purposes.

The main site at joomlabear.com is based on Joomla – Joomla 1.0.15 to be precise, and will very shortly be upgraded to Joomla 1.5.9.

So when to use Joomla and when to use WordPress? Well that is something I will be addressing in future posts because I think it’s an important topic and could save many of us days or weeks of grief in the long run if we choose the correct CMS framework that best matches our site’s purpose.

A strength of each system, off the top of my head:

Joomla’s user management which is built in and allows for user registration on your site out-of-the-box. Includes user email authentication, i.e the user must click a link in a n email they receive before their account is activated. Once registered a user will be able to use other components integrated into teh Joomla site such as forums, etc.

Wordpress on the other hand has an incredibly powerful commenting system which is built in – and for which I do not believe there is anything yet for Joomla that compares – not when spam protection and other factors are taken into consideration.

Of course there are hundreds of pros and cons for each platform, and amongst my many tasks over the coming weeks I intend to write a little bit more about this as I think it’s a topic that people will find very useful and something I have had quite a bit of experience with over the past couple of years.

In the meantime I want to let you all know I am installing a WordPress plugin that makes my comments “dofollow“. Wordpress by default ads a “nofollow” tag which means Google, and the other major search engines, ignore the link  back to the commentators website.

I’m removing this because I have decided I do not agree with the principal behind the nofollow tag – I believe if you take the time to comment you deserve a credit to your site. I also have a zero tolerance for spam and will not accept comments if they are spammy or off topic. And finally, I want to encourage people to interact with me and others here.

So go ahead and leave me a comment, what are you waiting for!

Time Lapse Video – View From JoomlaBear Office

The video above shows a time lapse of shots taken with a water proof stills camera. Pause between shots is 30 seconds. The sequence was started just before dawn and shot from our office window. Thats the view we see while we work on templates for you

The video was created by my very good friend Phil Aitken from Film Scouts who can be found at his site specializing in film locations.

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