Frailwords

Widgetkit has been around for 6 weeks now and during this time a lot happened. First we like to thank everyone who tried the Widgetkit betas and send us feedback. We really appreciate it! Until today we released 5 betas including bugfixes, optimizations and new widgets. Here are some notable features we added so far: translations, RTL support, editor support for Joomla’s TinyMCE and JCE, caption support for slideshows and HTML5 video playback in the lightbox. With the upcoming release of Joomla 1.7 on 19. July 2011, we also update Widgetkit to support the latest 1.7 version as well. This makes Widgetkit work perfectly on Joomla 1.5, 1.6 and 1.7 and the latest WordPress 3.2. Here is a overview of all the new widgets we have added since the first beta release:

Gallery

The gallery widget provides a great way to create a image gallery with multiple images on your website. With the built in directory browser you can easily add or remove image source directories and create your individual gallery in no time. To change the gallery’s overall appearance we added two new styles with BETA5, wall and slider, to current slideshow style. The wall style allows you to create image and polaroid walls with a lightbox and spotlight effect. The slider style puts the images next to each other and shows them fullsize on mouse hover with a sliding effect. Just pick your favorite style and everything else is done automatically in the background for you like image resizing and caching. It has never been that easy creating a awesome looking gallery!

Maps

The maps widget let’s you create maps with multiple locations and markers. Powered by the latest Google Maps API you can change various settings to create a map which perfectly fits into your website. The new style settings allow you to change overall map colors and adopt your site colors to the map. We promise that you’ll love this one!

Accordion

The accordion widget creates a group of items using a smooth sliding effect when selecting a item to display its content. We added simple and clean style to make the accordion easily match to a broad range of websites.

Media Player

We unveiled the media player already in BETA4 which let’s you playback video and audio files directly in you website content. Embedding videos is simply done through HTML5 <video /> element which is also widely supported on mobile devices like iPhones, iPads or Android phones and tablets. You also don’t need to worry about older browsers, because it has a flash fallback for all who don’t support these HTML5 elements. You can even play your .mp3 files by using the new <audio /> element. Great, is’nt it?

ZOO Integration

Widgetkit and ZOO are now able to communicate! This has been one of the most requested feature and we are glad that we deliver it to you now. By using Joomla plugin you can display any ZOO content within our freshly released widgets like accordion, maps and slideshow. Make sure to have the latest ZOO version installed as you’ll need it to customize the content that is being displayed.

The workflow is pretty straight forward and should already be known to you, if you’ve been using the ZOOtools. There is a new button in the Widgetkit dashboard called "Add new (ZOO)". Upon hitting it, you’ll be able to choose what content from ZOO to display. By customizing the layouts of the item types you may assign any element you want to be displayed. So enjoy the power of our fresh widgets paired with the comfort and the flexibility of the ZOO.

What’s next?

We are still not done yet! We will continue with adding new features to Widgetkit and we are also working on new widgets and style variations for existing widgets. If you have not tried it yet, make sure to check it out and send us feedback about how it works for you!

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Say hello to Downtown, our latest theme release. Downtown comes with a fresh design and a broad range of easy to combine elements like color schemes, background textures and fonts. This makes it pretty easy to create your own custom style. Additionally Downtown brings you cool features like CSS3 animations, a broad range of module variations with optional ribbons for headlines and a new custom style for the slideshow of our Widgetkit component.

Our Widgetkit gets some new features with the latest Beta 4 version. With the new Gallery widget you can easily create a image slideshow. Just select the folders where your images are stored, set a size, pick a style and you are done. The new Media Player lets you embed videos in the new HTML5 way but also adds a flash fallback for unsupported browsers. For all ZOO users we added a plugin which allows you to create Widgetkit slideshows from ZOO items.

• Available for Joomla 1.5, 1.6 and WordPress
• Choose from 8 styles, 5 textures, 7 colors and 8 fonts
• Custom mobile theme to match the theme design
• 2 module styles combinable with 4 badges and 6 icons
• Enriched with CSS3 goodies
• All Warp framework features are available

Joomla! Demo
WordPress Demo

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Yesterday was the Joomla User Group meeting we organized in Hamburg. Thanks to all of you who joined us and we all had a great time! We were about 30 people – from newbie to experienced Joomla user. Most came from Hamburg and nearby but some even traveled a longer distance from Mannheim! The meetup started at 19:30 and the last ones left shortly after midnight. We had a lot of nice conversations and it was great to meet all the people who are passionated about Joomla chatting together.

We didn’t expect that much people so for us the JUG meetup was a big success. We got a lot of positive feedback during the meetup so we are confident to organizing a second JUG meetup later this year. But next up is the Joomladay in Hamburg on September 2nd and 3rd. We will be there on both days (Business and Community Day) and will be available for all kinds of questions. We hope to see all of you guys there!

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Today we want to complete our 3 e-commerce club icon sets we released in the last month with some credit cards icons. The best part is, we provide it as freebie! We made credit card icons for the most common payment providers: Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, PayPal. We also added a generic bank card as well as a gift card in black and white. They are very clear designed and focused on the logo to assure a high recognition value. As always each icon comes in 8 different sizes, ranging from 16×16 to 512×512 pixels and you get the vector PDF files.

Download the credit cards icons and enjoy! If you like them please support us and make some buzz on Twitter.

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Welcome Quantum, our second Warp6 theme release! This new theme design comes with two style variations: A fancy dark version which uses bright colors combined with nice glow effects. And a more light version with subtle colors which fits perfect for business sites. The theme takes advantage of all the CSS3 goodies and also makes use of SVG images for gradients which offer great cross-browser support. Thanks to a little CSS3PIE magic it looks also great in all IEs.

Just a few days ago we released the first version of Widgetkit our next tool set for Joomla and WordPress. The Quantum theme shows all the new widgets in action like Slideshow, Lightbox, Spotlight and Twitter. All widgets make use of modern web technologies like HTML5 markup, CSS3 features and jQuery based JavaScripts. Widgetkit is also designed to work on iPads, iPhones and Android phones or tablets.

• Available for Joomla 1.5, 1.6 and WordPress
• Choose from 2 styles (dark and light), 5 colors and 8 fonts
• 2 mobile themes for dark and light styles
• 4 module styles combinable with 4 badges and 6 icons
• Enriched with CSS3 goodies and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)
• All Warp framework features are available

Joomla! Demo
WordPress Demo

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We are proud to finally announce the first release of Widgetkit our next generation tools set. Widgetkit is the successor of the famous YOOtools we first introduced in January 2008. Back then the YOOtools were only built to work with Joomla 1.5 and Joomla 1.0 (for those who remember the old times) and until today enriched countless websites. As time flies by so fast in the web our tools aged and were due for a major update. So we started working on a new version of our tools back in August 2010, right after we finished our work on the Warp 5.5 theme framework.

When we started we basically had two choices, the easy one would be to take each YOOtool and update it’s code to work with our default JavaScript library jQuery and keep everything else. Each tool would still require you to use Joomla articles to fill their content. This seems like a reasonable approach, but we thought if we have the opportunity to re-design the tools what can we do differently now to make them even better. We also wanted to achieve compatibility with Joomla 1.6 and to make them available for WordPress. Giving all this a lot of thought, we came up with great ideas which are now implemented in Widgetkit. With Widgetkit we created a whole new concept to make the tools easier to use, install, update and extend.

Widgetkit basically acts as a platform for all our widgets. It installs as a single component in Joomla 1.5 and Joomla 1.6 or as a plugin in WordPress 3.x. The Widgetkit dashboard presents you an overview of all widgets. You can create, edit or delete all widgets and their content in one place. And after you have created the content for your first widget you can either use a shortcode or a module to display your widget anywhere on your website. In fact you can do both because once have you created a widget you are able to display it multiple times and reuse it on different parts of your website.

Our first Widgetkit BETA offers you four commonly used widgets which are Slideshow, Lightbox, Spotlight and Twitter. All widgets are written from scratch using HTML5 markup, CSS3 features and JavaScripts based on jQuery. Here is a quick overview of all the widgets features:

Slideshow

The Widgetkit Slideshow is the most interesting widget of the Widgetkit BETA release. It takes full advantage of the very user-friendly Widgetkit administration user interface. You can easily create and manage slideshows and their different slides. It comes with 15 eye-catching transition effects which are all based on hardware accelerated CSS3 animations with a JavaScript fallback for all Internet Explorers. This makes the slideshow run smoothly on iPads, iPhones and Android phones. As icing on the cake the slideshow can be browsed using swipe gesture on mobile phones.

Lightbox

The Widgetkit Lightbox is our new and shiny lightbox. It is originally based on the great Fancybox for jQuery. We did some optimization, removed IE6 support and used CSS3 and HTML5. It also comes with support for YouTube and Vimeo videos as well as SWF movies. It replaces our old lightbox so there is no need to use the YOOeffects plugin anymore.

Spotlight

We also added the Spotlight effect to Widgetkit which you all know from our Warp5.5 themes. That’s the reason why we removed it from Warp6. The new Spotlight effect, is also enhanced and is a lot easier to use than the previous version.

Twitter

The Widgetkit Twitter widget replaces our old YOOtweet module. It is completely rewritten and the caching is optimized. The tweets will show up even if Twitter is not available.

What’s next?

Since this is the first BETA version of Widgetkit, we will give it some time to collect all appearing issues and bugs and release a second BETA in the next weeks. But of course we are already working on new widgets which will be added to Widgetkit. Following widgets are currently planned: Accordion, Maps, Gallery, Scroller, Tooltips and of course more Slideshow styles. So enjoy Widgetkit and take it for a test drive!

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We are going to organize a Joomla User Group meeting in Hamburg, Germany! It will be a social meeting in a relaxed atmosphere in a restaurant/bar. Anyone who is working with Joomla, no matter if you are a newbie or an experienced developer, is invited to join us. We will chat about Joomla and you can ask our team about the template designs, the Warp6 framework and our ZOO extension. Thomas Kahl, organizer of the Joomla Day Germany 2011 and known as VirtuemartExpert will join us, too. So if you are starting an ebusiness he’s the guy you want to talk to. Also Jan Gieselberg will join our meet up. You will know him from his website Joomla Downloads where he usually blogs about Joomla and provides a directory for selected extensions.

We think this get together will be a great warm up for the upcoming Joomla Day Germany in Hamburg. Expect some good conversations and lots of fun! And the best part is all beers will be on us, the whole evening! So come and join us.

The meetup will be on Wednesday, 15. June at 19.30 in Hamburg (Winterhude, Gertigstraße). Please
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if you will attend. The location will be announced soon. We look forward to meet all of you soon!

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Today we are very proud to release our new Nano theme! It’s entirely based on what we have been working on over the past 6 months: Our brand new Warp6 theme framework!

Nano is the first theme that’s build with Warp6, our fast and slick theme framework! It takes full advantage of all the latest Warp6 features like semantic HTML5 markup, a mobile theme, a nice and clean administration UI and much more. You won’t find any bloated code or features that will slow your site. It’s created from a developers perspective – simplified, no magic, just a great toolset to develop cross-platform themes.

Nano is an optimized and streamlined framework theme and serves as a blueprint to build your own custom themes. It offers 5 different theme styles to get you started right away. Each style has a slightly different motif and inherits its structure and layout from a default base theme. Those styles themselves will function as a starting point for you to design your own customizations, modifications and enhancements. That’s simply done through inheritance. It has never been easier to have smaller variations of your theme for presentation purposes.

• Available for Joomla 1.5, 1.6 and WordPress
• 5 style variations available
• Choose from 5 colors and 8 fonts
• 1 module style combinable with 4 badges and 6 icons
• Flexible template and column widths
• All Warp framework features are available

Joomla! Demo
WordPress Demo

Warp6 Features

If you missed our blog post series about the Warp6 theme framework and all its features here you go:

• Warp6 – Engage
• Inside the Framework
• Warp6 Styles
• Warp6 and HTML5
• Warp6 CSS Framework
• Warp6 Administration
• Warp6 Mobile Theme

Warp6 is cutting-edge! It’s a major step and a great foundation for our future themes. Those themes will make heavy use of Warps astonishing features and possibilites. So hang tight and enjoy the Warp6 ride!

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Today we want to present some small but nice goodies of our Warp6 theme framework. We added additional layouts to customize several information pages. You are now able to configure and style your own offline and error pages. Also you can activate a dedicated browser upgrade page which only gets displayed to visitors using Internet Explorer 6.

All these pages use the same clean layout and display a relevant headline with a short description text. Therefore we have added a separate error.css file which defines the general error page style. This also gives you the opportunity to create your very own style for system messages like error codes and an offline message.

Error Page

Everyone knows the old fashioned error pages, they do their job but they don’t look good at all. Warp6 has a solution for this – your very own error pages. So when a visitor requests a missing page the error page layout will be displayed with the 404 error code and a description text.

Offline Mode

In case you change something big on your website or you just do some maintenance tasks you can simply activate the Offline Mode. Warp6 will use its error page layout to display an offline message to inform your visitors you are currently updating your website.

IE6 Upgrade Page

It’s the year 2011! Modern web technologies like HTML5 and CSS3 are used all over the world wide web. The majority uses modern browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera and the latest Internet Explorer 9 and there are only less than 12% world wide who are still using the Internet Explorer 6 (which is about 0.5% of your website visitors). Like our previous theme framework, Warp6 has no Internet Explorer 6 support which means the theme will not look like it does in a supported browser. But with enabling the IE6 Upgrade Page you can tell the few visitors with Internet Explorer 6 that they are using an outdated browser and recommend modern browser options to them. As you can see the IE6 Upgrade Page layout uses the same error page style which is now part of every Warp6 theme.

What’s next?

What do you think about the new error page style? That was our last teaser blog post about the new Warp6 features. Next is our first Warp6 based theme release on Monday, May 2nd. It will serve as an optimized and streamlined framework theme and you can finally get your hands on all the new features. Stay tuned!

Related blog posts:

Warp6 Mobile Theme

Warp6 Administration

Warp6 CSS Framework

Warp6 and HTML5

Warp6 Styles

Inside the Warp6 Framework

Warp6 Announcement

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Warp6 comes with a dedicated theme for mobile devices! We know this was a long time awaited feature. Now you’ll get it!

Mobile Theme

So what is a mobile theme? A mobile theme provides the general look and feel of a mobile device’s user interface, so you’ll get the best browsing experience on the go. Warp6 supports all mobile browsers which use the WebKit engine like the Apple iPhone, iPod Touch and Google Android devices!

And yes we also support the iPhone 4 and its new retina display, with its awesome 960-by-640-pixel resolution on a 3.5 inch LCD. The Retina display has four times the number of pixels as previous iPhones, resulting in double the pixel density.

This means that the theme requires optimized images for the high pixel density display. And guess what, we deliver the mobile theme with all images optimized for the retina display to show up in a crisp resolution.

Toolbar

Let’s take a look at the mobile theme itself. First you notice the toolbar with the logo position and followed by the button area to quickly access the navigation menu, search and login.

Logo

You can publish a custom module on the mobile-logo position to display your logo image or just leave it unassigned and the site name will automatically be displayed.

Layout

The mobile theme layout is clean and slick using all the goodies of HTML5 and CSS3. You won’t find any unnecessary images or bloated markup. Thanks to CSS3 – all is done with web gradients, box-shadow and all the other cool toys that CSS3 brings into play. For example we make use of the hardware accelerated CSS3 animations for all our nifty effects. No JavaScript effects anymore – this guarantees fast and smooth animations. So you’ll get not only a nice interface but also a mobile optimized layout with a compact size.

Search

Use the search button and you’ll get a search dialog which will utilize your systems search functionality to display all matching results for your query.

Login

And of course you can also login through the mobile theme to provide access to content only for registered users.

Menu

The menu button brings up the site navigation in a dropdown menu which can be nested in multiple sub levels. Further you are also able to setup a dedicated mobile menu, which can differ from your main site navigation.

Switcher

We believe in the freedom of choice Thats why we added a button that let’s you switch between the mobile and the desktop theme.

Administration

The administration options for the mobile theme are pretty self-explanatory. In general you can switch the mobile theme support on and off, enable/disable the toolbars login and search buttons and assign module positions to the mobile position aliases. The position aliases help you to re-use modules from positions which are already setup or you can use the dedicated positions which have a “mobile-” prefix. As you can see, it’s not rocket science – everything was kept simple and easy.

Conclusion

That’s it – the mobile theme support for the upcoming Warp6 framework. We put a lot of work in the mobile theme and are very proud to deliver one of the best experiences for mobile phones out there. Be excited as we are and … hey to all mobiles, here we come!

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