Joomla Templates

Hmm, it seems that the Transparent Bliss template isn't supported much, looking through very good questions here on the forum, but finding hardly any answers. :huh:

I think the Transparent Bliss template looks great, but there are serious lacks in it.
eg. support for a wide central window when the side panels arent used (it should autoexpand, and hide the panels if they are empty).

I've started using it, but coppermine gallery don't fit in the very narrow window, my videodb looks silly, and phpgedview is cramped. :blink:

I'm not in any way a coder, so I need a template that can handle this, without me having to use weeks on searching for the right line to comment out, or figure out how to make a counter that removes an element if it's empty.

The round corners should be easy to keep if the corners were made individually to the vertical and horisontal lines.

I guess this is the level of support they are willing to give without having a private user forking out a lot money on a template... :S

Hi,

Thanks for your post and you have brought up some good questions.

Firstly I would like to say I will be working on a revamp of transparent bliss over the next week. A lot of quesions will be answered and I will release a new square corner version to provide a little more flexibility... more on this soon.

In response to "The round corners should be easy to keep if the corners were made individually to the vertical and horizontal lines."
Unfortunately this is not the case due to the transparency - the standard method of creating individual rounded corners using 4 divs - with the 4 rounded corner images applied as background images to each successive div does not allow for transparency - you still need to set the background color for one of the divs or use a tiling background image with transparency - but then your corner images and background image will overlap. This is why the template has a fixed width.

I can think of another method that may work... but it's something I came up with late at night and it's just a theory at present... as soon as I have a spare couple of days to mess around with it I will give it a go. Unfortunately here lies the problem...

I would like to address the issue of support in the forum, and it is an issue because I would love to spend a lot more time here. Unfortunately I still have to support the family with contract work - and sometimes this turns into weeks of 12 hour days with little time for JoomlaBear.

We receive very little in the way of donations - often $10-$20 per month which doesn't come close to covering our $80 USD per month hosting bill. Despite the fact that over 8000 people have downloaded our templates (Ignore the DocMan stats as we switched download systems a month ago) we have probably only received donations from approx 0.3% of users - about 3 in every 1000 downloads.

Now we don't expect people to donate, though it's nice if you do :silly: I actually like providing a good free resource for the community and enjoy designing and building themes for Joomla. We understand not everyone can contribute money - I remember well my days as a student when I would literally run out of $$ before the end of the week and be eating plain boiled rice and noodles at home until my part time job pay check came through... There are plenty of people in this position and we know you can't all donate.

However this leaves us in a difficult position with only so much time to devote to this. We hope you will understand and maybe one day we will see a little more love flowing through this site in the way of donations and will be able to put a little more time in. I would make JoomlaBear a full time occupation in an instant if I could feed my wife and kids on the back of it.

Good to see a response. ;) I've been trying to re-work TB2 myself.

I hear ya about the time, etc. - I'm glad you provided the template, it's far & away the coolest freebie I found! I would like to see a few things more configurable, though - I look forward to your updates.

Is there a way to float you a donation without buying a recurring subscription? I'd love to kick something your way, for sure - I just can't do a recurring payment right now...

As a matter of fact...I have a question maybe you can help with? (I'm a total n00b to css...)

I edited the size alloted for the "logo" graphic to accomodate our logo, as well as adding the top graphic for our banner - everything moved down, but the transparency around the menu did something strange.

If you have a second - www.willowhousemusic.com

Do you know what's happening with that?

Many thx for the nice feedback.

Hve you checked out Pattern Bear? I'm pretty happy with this one also.

Regarding the donation - you can donate any amount you like as a one-off via paypal through the donation box top right.

Did you sign up recently? We setup a subscription system a little while ago but will most likely disable this.

I was mulling over the idea of the "template club" where we could offer priority support and maybe some pro templates for subscribers....

But to tell you the truth it feels wrong - we want to keep this free.

I have noticed over the past 6 months that all manner of Template Clubs have sprung up out of nowhere....
Evey man and his dog is starting a template club and wants to cash in on the Joomla Template club phenomenon. For a while I thought it was just Rocket and Joomlart but we now have Shape5, TemplatePlaza, Yootheme, GacickPro to name a few... I know I've seen at least 4 others in the past month that I can't recall the names of.

Regarding willowhousemusic.com

you have set the size of the top slice to 150px height - www.willowhousemusic.com/templates/
transparent_bliss_1.5/images/left-top.png

You should set this to 10px height which is the actual size of the image - youll do this in index.php not in the css.

In html you can tell an image to display at any size you want but in most cases it will look pretty bad - stick to the size the image was created at.

Cheers

BB

Huh - I'll check that, thanks! I didn't mean to set that part - I was setting the upper images to 150 to fit the graphic, & must have changed one too many numbers! lol!

The new template is nice too - not what I would be going for with this site, but very cool nonetheless!

Its easy to slip and accidentally change another parameter - done it myself many a time :)

Use firefox and get the web developer tool bar - i trouble shooted your problem in 10 seconds by right clicking on the offending image and getting "parameters" - I could see it was set to 150px height - I then right clicked again and chose "view image" just to make sure the actual image hadn't been modified to be 150px high - Firefox displayed the image by itself at its actual size (which was 10 px high) with the "view image" command and from this we can quickly deduce that the image size is set incorrectly in the html

cheers

BB

also looking at your site - if you have decided to go with only 2 columns you can modify the width of #wrapper so that the two columns that are present are centered - change the 980px value

left column = 180px + right column = 600px + 10 px margin in between columns = 790 px total

Sometimes IE6 interprets the margins incorrectly so you could just set wrapper to 800px to be safe. See what it looks like - your page should be centered now instead of slightly left-of-center (sounds like politics!)

#wrapper

{

height: 100%;

width: 980px; << change this to 800px

margin-right: auto;

margin-left: auto;

margin-top: 10px;

}

Thanks & thanks again! :)

I've used Firefox for years now - I'll have to grab that toolbar, that would be really helpful.

Yeah, I did want to go 2-column on the site. It was after your help with the left, actually, that I was able to find the code for the right side & comment it out. When I get a chance I'll play around with the measurements you suggest.

OK - did that, it was OK...but I wanted the middle ("right") section bigger, so I changed the values to 690 to split the difference, and resized the right-(x).png graphics to 690x10 - voila! :D Worked great!

I still need to balance the top, I think. I'll fiddle with the placement of the banner & see what I come up with - I might even just re-make it a little larger, I dunno.

I'm starting to figure my way around it, though.

Just to say hello and thank you very, very much! for such an interesting and adequate template. You can visit my brand new project www.parquesdecaracas.com and see how I have used your great template project.

I only wish some day I will really have all those banners actually producing money. So far up to this moment it is only wishfull thinking, looking into some simple marketting done by visiting some local vendors and visually luring them into contributing with sports and recreation.

I also have the problem of some extentions not fitting in the 600px wide central board, like Fireboard, and others that need wide space to display and perform. I have worked hard modifiyng Fireboard, but there is so much unknown detail involved for an alien newbie like me that maybe the simplest way around is to be able to have a wide central board and no right one in the template when some extentions need so.

I look forward to your offering whenever you can find the time to do it. I can not offer much in the way of money because we, in Venezuela, are practically forbidden to buy abroad through internet. If I can get around this, I have you first of all in my list.

Well just to say thanks again.

Carlos:)