Joomla! Discussion Forums

The SiteGround template is created by a team of web designers and developers at SiteGround web hosting company. We are happy to contribute to the Joomla community by participating in this contest with our latest work. The SiteGround template is designed to allow both novice and advanced users to easily customize the their websites.





Download: http://joomla15.siteground.com/siteground.zip
Demo Site: http://joomla15.siteground.com/
Night Demo: http://joomla15.siteground.com/night/


The most interesting options of the SiteGround template are:

  1.The Administrator can choose among four season based themes + one general theme trough the Template theme dropdown.
  2.The Administrator can choose among two fixed and one fluid template width settings.
  3.The Administrator can choose whether the template is centered, left- or right- aligned
  4.The Administrator can provide the option to change all of the functionalities listed above to his/her visitors, via the unique Control panel bar, displayed at the top right corner of the site.
    NEW: Now the Administrator can enable/disable each of the three changers separately, allowing for leaving only selected ones.
  5. The template provides the option for displaying either the website title or the Joomla logo as part of the template header. The website administrator can also choose to display a website slogan. The Paramaters allow for a great choice of fonts and colors both for the title and the slogan display.
  6. The Edges Style option allows for choosing between rounded and sharp edges.
  7. Another interesting functionality is a neat dynamic Flash-generated stat charts for results in the polls component.
  8. We've also added an original feature in the Newsflash module that provides easy browsing through the news items.
  9. The template is compatible with sites with or without Search module.
10. NEW! If you have a multileveled top menu structure it is now possible to make it visible to the visitor by enabling the Cascading Top Menu option. It will display on mouse over the submenu items right below their Top Menu parent and the underlying submenus likewise recursively up to three levels deep.
11. NEW! There is a Night mode feature, which enables a new Night theme on your site. When enabled from the template control panel, the night theme overrides the current theme setting and displays the template in night mode.
12. NEW! We added a special Auto mode to the Night mode options in the control panel. Setting the Auto option results in automatic Night mode activation, based on individual visitor time. E.g. a visitor of your site whose local clock is reading 10:30 pm (22:30) or anywhere between 10pm and 6am will see your site in night mode. Visitors with local time in the daily timezone (6am - 10pm) will see the site in the theme that is otherwise set as default in the template admin panel.

Technical information about the template:

Standards:
- xHTML 1.0 valid
- CSS2 valid

Technical details:

- The template uses PHP GD png support (if present on the server) to generate the dynamic logo and employs caching to avoid unnecessary re-generation of the logo with the same params.
- The fonts for logo title and slogan can be replaced with TTF font file(s) of your liking to achieve even higher level of customization.
- The user has to provide the web server user with permissions to write in the cache subfolder of the template in order to make use of the logo caching functionality.
- The dynamic JS DOM manipulations use the mootools JS library, which is a part of Joomla 1.5 in order to avoid loading additional external libraries, which would have increased the size and time for loading of the pages.

We will highly appreciate your feedback for future improvements of the template!

Nice template. The design is really nice.

I like!

Looking well polished.

very cool...
but in fluid mode,
the line "Designed by SiteGround Web Hosting" is strange.

Regards,

Kien.

Yeah, I noticed that too.

the images chosen are beautiful... with the psd files you can change it into a more joomla design... 

Nice, clean design

Many errors:

Thanks Kien for the feedback - this is now fixed. There was a bug in the edges style option of the template.

We have put the template under heavy testing and within a couple of hours hopefully all bugs should be fixed. Thanks for the feedback! 

Mike

Some inside news about the template!

We are still debating what the default theme should be - the template has 5 themes (general one, and 4 seasons) - at the moment the one that looks best is the "summer theme", however, the girls in the office want to have the "autumn" version.

All comments/ideas would be very welcomed!

Thanks again,

Mike

lol, what about having it random.. different theme for different pages, like they did on http://www.joomlart.com 's Rochea template??

I am not sure that is a good idea for this template - when we planned it the idea was to have one standard outlook and the administrator to have the flexibility to change the theme without really changing the template (something like google do with their logo).

I will definitely create in the next few weeks a template similar to this one with 5 to 10 general themes, and the administrator will have the option to choose which ones he/she likes and whether they like to have them changed randomly, or if possible, to say which inside page what theme to display.

For now we will have to stick with one design, we are still unsure - a couple of friends voted for the winter... more or less everyone has their own preferences..

I like that googlish idea 

Fixed

have you updated the zip file for a new download for testing?

Yes, the zip file is updated, and you are more than welcome to test!

Looking forward to future notes, suggestions, remarks!

ok, downloading

Hello Everybody!

first of all thank you for the feedback - you have been very helpful. All the reported issues should have been fixed, we also discovered others that are fixed also.

Can you please have a look again at the template, and give us final feedback?

Thanks!

Mike

Everything looks good. The only thinng I might do is work on the control panel styling. Try using the styling for the rest of the site.

Great job!

Thanks Matt! That is definitely something that we will consider doing in the near future. I have a list of about a dozen of features that will be added in the next version. Also, we already have planned to add more than 20 new themes (header combined with different coloring), as well as more functionalities for the customer and the admin to customize. We have a joomla template section on our website and definitely this template will be the No.1 lead template for Joomla 1.5. We have a policy (we implemented it from google) to invest some development and design time into open source with whatever each one of us likes, and in the last few months we have produced hundreds of templates and scores of modules and components, but the thrill of producing a good Joomla 1.5 template has been unbelievable.

More or less 6 people have contributed to this template, our team manager spent over 30 consecutive hours (around 80hours in the last 4 days) in the office to have the project done by yesterday (to have a day for comments and bug fixing)

Unfortunately there is no time for any more improvements/additions for the competition, so for now we will stick with what we have

Thanks for everyone's feedback and good luck to everybody!

Mike and the Siteground crew

wow ... this is cool ... i like it ... 

Nice job

Download and demo link don't work right now.

Everything looks good.
Download and demo link work.

now they do

Just some notes from testing

1# There is random text appearing in the top-middle (see screenshot1)
2# Some untranslated strings in the Template Parameters (see screenshot2)

this is for sure the winner for me

very very very well done 

thanks for the feedback, this has now been fixed!

PS: I read your post on rockettheme's forum - thank you for including us in your top 5 shortlist. In the final version, hopefully there will be a surprise for you - we will create a version with "contrast of shades, colours, even slightly to obscure that mass white look. "



cheers!

Mike

You have sparked my interest