Yesterday was a big day for us. We released our work of the last 9 months to the public. We want to thank everybody for the nice feedback we received via twitter, email, comments and the forum! Some bugs were reported and we already fixed them. The Pro and the Lite Edition are both updated to 1.0.1 and are now available to download.

In the next weeks we will be working on more documentation and also publish more tutorials about the template system. Including an advanced guide on how to use the full power of the ZOO Editions. Anybody who didn’t download the ZOO yet? Jump over to the ZOO website, watch the video tour and get your own ZOO Edition.

First of all we are a little surprised by all the buzz in our comments of our latest article about the ZOO licenses. This is the first time that we release an extension that big like ZOO and it was somehow obvious for us that the ZOO extensions will be a YOOtheme product of its own along with its own website and subscription model.

Today we like to give you a quick update on how the upcoming ZOO extension will be distributed. The ZOO will be released in two editions: The Lite Edition and the Pro Edition.

The Lite Edition will be will be available as a free download for everybody. The Pro Edition will be available as a commercial extension. You can purchase a single license for 99€. A single license means you can install the ZOO in one Joomla installation. The single ZOO license gives you access to the YOOtheme member area with downloads, updates and the forum for 3 months.

Content is king! The Scoop template is the ideal solution if you want to create a news site, magazine or blog. If you need an unobtrusive template that does not distract your users but makes them focus on your content, go and get the Scoop template!

It comes with 9 different menu colors and 6 background variations which can be combined together. It is also a real lightweight. The Scoop template is almost entirely styled via CSS and only needs very few template images which makes it load super fast. Also you can customize it very easily: Almost all design changes can be made via CSS so you will hardly ever have to modify any images to change the look and feel of your site.

Feature list

• Extreme lightweight and fast loading
• Tableless overrides for all Joomla components
• Smart CSS to customize Joomla components
• Enhanced module system with flexible proportions
• Fully sliced Fireworks .png Source files
• Works with all YOOtools

We already talked about the ZOO extensions itself. Also explained its features like the CCK and the catalog system. But to make the ZOO a great extensions we need a seamless integration into Joomla. Thats why the ZOO component will also include a menu module and and a search plugin.

In our last blog post we described the CCK feature of our new ZOO extension in detail. This time we want to take a closer look at the catalog system.

One great thing about the ZOO is that with a single installation of this component you can create unlimited catalogs. This means you can create for example a product catalog, a download archive and a news magazine. All these use cases are basically catalogs with different contents. Furthermore different templates and styles can be assigned and each catalog will have it's own individual design and layout. Using Joomla's powerful overriding features you will have full control of all ZOO layouts. Finally you can use ZOO for very different purposes on a single website. Take the YOOtheme website for example, since our Joomla 1.5 migration back in January we use the ZOO component ourselves to manage our download section and also this blog you are reading right now. So you have been using the ZOO component for quiet some time... ;-)

After we announced our upcoming ZOO component we received quite a lot of comments. Now there are some rumors out there because we put a couple of hints about the ZOO on our teaser website.

Some people were wondering what the acronym CCK stands for. CCK means Content Construction Kit. The CCK is a module to create custom content types within the Drupal CMS. It is a great and powerful feature we always wanted for our favorite CMS and its functionality has been requested by the Joomla community for a long time, so we created our own super flexible Joomla catalog component that comes with a comprehensive content construction functionality.

Being our only child componentwise we thought the Teamlog might feel a little lonely, and since we got a lot of positive feedback on it we thought it would be a good idea to create another Joomla component ;-)

In our next post we will show you some of its features. We know we teased you a bit for the last month, but you might already guess what it is from the name and the little hints we put on the new teaser site.

Put it on your wall! Our february template Pinboard is made of 5 different materials and you also get to choose from a wide range of nice wallpapers. More than 210 combinations are possible.

Pinboard comes with a largest collection of modules… we updated the designs of our popular post-it and polaroid styles and created completely new designs like cardboard, a note on checkered paper, oldschool printing paper and a tile. We also added 6 magnets and a pin. Together there are more than 80 different module combinations possible.

Most importantly we made use of our new overrides to create different stylings for blog layouts and other components. In this template the blogposts of the blog layouts (frontpage, section, category) appear on individual sheets of paper.

Feature list

• 23 different background with more than 210 combinations
• Tableless overrides for all Joomla components
• Smart CSS to customize Joomla components
• Enhanced module system with flexible proportions
• Fully sliced Fireworks .png Source files
• Works with all YOOtools

In the previous post we told you about our new template overrides (which you can download here) that render the Joomla output tablelessly. Now we can create websites that have semantic markup and a sensible structure. But actually the tables were not the only problem we had with the way the Joomla core treats content. Also we quickly reached the limits on how we could style the content. In this post we want to present some improvements we made with our overrides.