Nuevvo: A New Template Club from Joomlaworks

It’s a Joomla! template club with a twist. We wanna do things simpler than they are without compromising any flexibility, design, speed or other factors that make up today’s modern templates in the web community in general.

For that reason, we decided to just use the tools we already have: Joomla!

There is no reason to provide a set of plugins and components and modules just to provide a few tweaks on the template.

Others are going further introducing drag and drop interfaces to do everything. This makes any potential Joomla! go possible “awwww” when they see a nice design and when they actually try to use it “jeeeez”…

All in all, things have gotten more complicated. We believe this can change. All template parameters are controlled via the Joomla! template manager and all the basic files of the template -namely index.php and the CSS files- are all editable via the Joomla! template manager.

The “wizardry” goes down to the work we’ve done with the extension overrides. And most of the times you won’t need to change those. E.g. if you use K2 nowadays (most pro sites do that), you have all the options to enable or disable parts of the content that gets output on your site. If you don’t want to show the author’s name in an article, you can just disable it. No need to edit any HTML or PHP code.

K2 is a first-class citizen for us, for obvious reasons – disclaimer: we built it…

But we’ve made sure that people who don’t want to use K2 for any reason, are also provided with a solution that is similar to K2. We’ve created nuContent, which is essentially how Joomla! content modules should have been created. Using a couple of plugin in nuContent (which is provided as a single installable package) we can do image processing like K2 and add social features or even comments via the Disqus comments service (currently the most popular web service for comments).

The nuContent modules works very similarly to K2 modules: you can retrieve content from any Joomla! article category in any imaginable filters, retrieve latest comments, tags, display tag clouds, an ajax search box and many more. It’s like we made a K2 mini-me for Joomla! articles. And of course we’ve adapted all com_content overrides to be as simple and SEO friendly as K2’s.

Yes. We want people to be able to enjoy beautiful designs with their Joomla! projects, use the tools Joomla! already provides them with and for the more advanced users, allow them to edit our templates easily so they can differentiate even further. That’s one of the reasons we also provide full PSD sources with our templates. People who know how to use them will strongly appreciate that the crucial moment they need to re-word part of the design and the source is just there for them.

We’re gonna keep it simple. 1 template per month with some free templates being released occasionally, so people can see first hand what it’s like to develop a site with a Nuevvo Joomla! template. We will be maintaining and improving nuContent (e.g. adding controls to it via the jForm API), so we can further simulate the flexibilty of K2 with the default Joomla! article system. That will also make it easier for folks who want to buld a small site and don’t wish to use and 3rd party extensions.

Down the road I see a few more extensions, most geared towards UI enhancements and improvements (expect an amazing slideshow built from scratch for optimal performance and responsiveness) and extensions that improve the performance of a Joomla! website, but without – and I’ll repeat that – without messing with the code generated/created by third-party extension developers.

We’ve been there and we know how things can get frustrated for extension developers. We want our templates to be the backbone of your next Joomla! project, resting assured they will never produce any conflicts to 3rd party Joomla! extensions.