JoomlaWorks

Typography on the web has grown leaps and bounds in the past few years. Gone are the days when you had to choose between a handful of system fonts with sometimes embarrassing results (Yes I’m looking at you Comic Sans) or you had to jump through various hoops to use a non-system font on your website. Thankfully the resources and tools available right now make it easier and safer to make changes to an existing website design or template as long as we bear in mind some common best practices and take advantages of the tools at our disposal. Let’s dive in and examine some of these.

This week in our series of web design and development blog posts we are going to dive deep into responsive Joomla templating and demonstrate part of our daily template development workflow here at JoomlaWorks HQ.

So much has been said and done about this popular so-called trend that we call 'Flat Design' and which we see everywhere in websites and mobile applications. In fact it's so ubiquitous that it almost feels like there's some new rule stuck above every designer's monitor, fearfully stipulating something like: "Thou shall design everything to be as flat as possible". Let's look into some of the misunderstandings about flat design and how we can benefit from it.

2013 is bringing a lot of new cool things from the JoomlaWorks labs. New extensions that we hope will redefine essential functionality within any Joomla site and lots of updates to our existing line of extensions, like K2, Frontpage Slideshow and Simple Image Gallery Pro. The latter will now become a "component based" extension (from just a plugin) to allow content managers to easily create and edit image galleries and their captions for K2 and any other extension within Joomla.

We've always put user friendlyness and ease of use above all when building our extensions. At least up to what's possible for any type of extension.  Simple Image Gallery Pro was great (and still is) as a plugin that allows you to zip a bunch of files and quickly transform them to an image gallery grid. It's no wonder why the free version is one of the most popular extensions in the Joomla Extensions Directory for many years now. People hate to use tools that take more time to deal with than the actual content they're producing. If it takes you more time to upload a gallery than shooting the actual pictures, then there's a problem. And unfortunately, many gallery components in the Joomlasphere simply fail to deliver what they promise.

A few days ago we launched SocialConnect, a new kind of social extension for Joomla which we plan to extend over time to become the no. 1 integration hub for social networks for your Joomla site.

It's part of our "masterplan" to redefine what we consider basic functionality for any Joomla site. It started with K2 and now it's moving deeper into more specialized areas. SocialConnect is an extension that -as with all things made by JoomlaWorks- came out from a real need. And it was tested extensively for more than a year on the K2 Community, before being publicly released.

We generally do both dedicated and VPS hosting for our websites, apps and some premium projects we run for others.

When we choose to have VPS servers (aka virtual machines or VMs for short) instead of dedicated servers, we usually opt for VMware's free ESXi 5 and install Ubuntu Server as the OS for the VPSs we create on top of ESXi 5. It may not be as friendly as some VPS providers like Amazon, Rackspace etc. but you got more control and it's on YOUR hardware (pretty important actually!)...

Now, when you build a VPS on VMware, you start with say 40GBs of hard disk space. You install the OS, setup the server, move the sites on this new server and you're on. But what happens when there's no more room on the server for your site or sites and you need to add more disk space?