Joomla’s big birthday is upon us, with August 17th 2015 marking ten whole years since that first Mambo fork officially came into being and started a life of its own. And what a ten years it’s had. In a world where websites can come and go in the blink of an eye, and software can find itself obsolete in less time than it takes to make a cup of tea, ten years of success is one impressive achievement.
A free template for the Joomla community
The Joomla community has been the driving force behind the CMS’ development from the start, and if you want to know how passionate, driven and focused they are, check that birthday again; ten years isn’t something a community will reach without a love for what they’re doing! As a little gift from us, we’re releasing our snazzy new Joomla template, Portfolio, as a completely free, open-source download for the community to enjoy!
What has the Portfolio template got to offer?
There’s a lot of cool things built into Portfolio that we think makes it pretty special, and our developers have done all they can to make Portfolio fast, responsive and visually-appealing in all aspects, whether its the stylish grid-based Polaroid-esque frontpage layout, modern reveal and hover animations or typography settings for diverse content. Let’s have a closer look to see what kind of design and options you can take advantage of.
Lightweight, solid coding
What’s the most annoying thing about browsing online? Well, if you’re reading this you’re probably a bit more web-savvy than the general population so your answer is probably something like “Damn those hamburger icons” or “How many modules does that sidebar really need?”, but for the average user its websites that load too slowly. And by “too slowly”, I mean “two seconds and they’re outta here”. Yep, its safe to say we’re getting used to fast load speeds, so anything you can do to keep your site lightweight is a boon. When our developers created Portfolio, rather than relying on our existing Gavern framework they decided to use the simplicity of the design to build everything from scratch with clean code, using LESS for CSS generation. It keeps the theme light and fast loading, with the balance that the available options won’t go as in-depth as you’d find in a Gavern-powered template.
That’s not to say that Portfolio is lacking in features; far from it. In fact, since Portfolio is a Joomla release of our mature (and also completely free) Portfolio WordPress theme, the design has been refined to accommodate all the amazing user feedback we’ve received for that version. Enjoy reveal and hover animations, gallery pages with a full-screen lightbox and pagination options, plus cool typography options, including blockquotes, tables and nested lists, along with a few flashier tricks like left or right-aligned images and page breaks in your content that blend beautifully with the theme style.
Customize to your heart’s content
So Portfolio’s got some nice looks, but looks aren’t everything; there needs to be substance underneath to really catch people’s attention. Despite the template being built from scratch, there’s still an awesome set of options to help you add your own footprint to the design. Check out what you can do with Portfolio:
- Set the background color and primary color of the template using a color picker, or swap it out for a background image, all without manually changing CSS.
- Add any Google Font to your site to give it a totally new look.
- Get full control over Portfolio’s animations; turn them on/off, set animation speed and direction, or change to a scale or opacity animation.
- Configure post preview info (tags, category etc…under the preview), set the item height and padding,
- Set the number of module columns for the top and bottom module areas.
We’ve got a few more tricks hidden away too; you can’t see it in the demo site, but we’ve implemented some additional module areas to cover a few useful functions you might want to add. Two of these, search and top-menu, can be used to display a search bar and social icon menu:
And there’s also a breadcrumb area at the bottom if your site is a bit more complex and you want your users to know where they are:
Give Portfolio a try today!
Portfolio’s completely free, so there’s no excuse for not giving it a trial spin. Click the LIVE DEMO button to see this great template in action, then head over to our download section and get going! If you’d prefer, you can also download the package separately via our GitHub repository, or drop in and make a contribution.
Portfolio is completely open-source, and despite it being based off our existing WordPress theme we’ve got no intention of slowing down; we’ll be making plenty of improvements to Portfolio in the future so if you have any suggestions or requests with regards to its feature list do drop a comment on the repository. Our devs are very active there and will definitely read any and all requests; no promises that we’ll be able to implement them all, but every piece of feedback is appreciated! If you’ve downloaded Portfolio and find yourself running into problems, come and create a new issue in the Issues Section of the repository; whether you’re an existing customer or not we’ll be happy to help you out.