And one more little example.
Just look, what a difference a little, little shadow makes in terms of layout. It also might be a light background or anything. But please something else then thin lines between two white spaces ...

Hi Julian,

Thanks for your input. Can you submit your new themes request into our voice page? http://stackideas.com/voices/easysocial

Regarding box-shadow for the stream items, actually everyone has their own taste you can customize to fit your needs. Some users think a light shadow box is awesome but some people think that is "2010". And here is the reason why we need to minimalist the design so that easy for users to customize. Also, having a lot of elements with box shadow will slow things down. Below are links for further reading on rendering performance.
http://johnotander.com/css/2015/06/10/css-performance/
http://nerds.airbnb.com/box-shadows-are-expensive-to-paint/
http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/speed/css-paint-times/
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16504281/css3-box-shadow-inset-painful-performance-killer
http://andy.edinborough.org/CSS-Stress-Testing-and-Performance-Profiling

Hi Julian, I love to do something like the notification icons and drop down menu you have top-right on the screenshot of the NLP site. Is that something custom you did.. or is it available from EasySocial package?

Hi Chang,

unfortunatelly, you did not understand what I mean.
It´s not about if shadows is better or not, it´s about the options.

You have four (!) different templates to choose from, but all of them look the same!
You have a very usefull navbar that is not possible to be integrated in a template without destroying the layout.
There are no options! There are not other themes to choose! Even if I compare Wanderers with Elegant ... the two templates look pretty much the same, only the colors have changed. And the new nav-bar ... the same with other color.

Why not developing an EasySocial-Template (not a Joomla-Template, ONLY a template for EasySocial, that can be used with other Joomla-TEmplates) which contaings a shading color on the stream-items? Why not a template with shadows? Why not giving more options instead of developing more and more variations of the exact same template?

The onliest template I found so far that looks a little bit different is Connecto:
http://www.demo.joomforest.net/j3/jf_connecto/easysocial
But the onliest real differences are the modules on the left side. I am longing for having different layouts on the steam-items.Look at Jomsocial for example. I like ES much more then JS ... but however, JS has much nicer templates. And more options.

About the navbar:
You have not even in mind, that your navbar might be a bad choose for some templates. Can you name me ANY template that your navbar looks good at? I know four of them:

1. Wanderers
2. Elegant
3. Conecto
4. JS Social 2

But ... you have a wonderfull possibility with the notification-icons and the ES-drop-down.They look great, they can be used everywhere, they are a good different choose. Why the hell do you not integrate the ES-Menu in the drop-down-menu? This makes absolutely no sense to me.

Whatever I do with Easysocial, it is really, really, really difficult to use anything else then the few templates that you have developed. And this few templates ... all of them look the same.

I don´t want to suggest you to start with developing big templates. This is other companies Job, like JoomlaShine, Joomlart or Rockettheme. What you should do is develop real alternatives for the ES-templates. To think about how the navbar can be integrated in DIFFERENT templates. And so on.

This is what I am begging for. It´s not about shadows. It´s about different tasts. Different possibilities. And they are very, very rare at ES at the moment.

All the best, Julian!

Hi Andy,

it´s the combination of two modules that are in the ES-package:

Notification-Icons and "Drop-Down-Menu".
Unfortunatelly, the Drop-Down-Menu is not able to contain the EasySocial-User-Menu. I have not a single bit of an idea, why I should place a main menu under the login of a user. This is the perfect place to put the user-menu of EasySocial and get rid of the toolbar.

The toolbar is nice ... but I guess you have the same problems: It takes space, it is a big task to integrate them on not-es-pages and it does not match most of the Joomla-Templates. This is why I would love to see an improvement on the notification-icons in combination with the drop-down-menu.

Bouth can be integrated with nearyl ANY template. Maybe you can help the to convince Stackideas to improve them a little.

All the best, Julian!

Thanks Julian... and good community discussion points you are raising here. It's helped me learn about these basic modules... and yes I am still working on how to get the layout looking beautiful on my own site (probably been working on that for years now that I think about it!!!!).

I'll explore the use of those modules vs. the toolbar on my site and chip-in again to this discussion to input where I can once I've got more familiar with how everything interacts. Until then, apologies for cluttering your discussion with my question and thanks for taking the time to answer.

Hey Andy,

I am sorry for the delay of this reply,

The reason why we didn't want to hardcoded to show default Easysocial menu from the drop down menu is because we would like to give user flexible to custom their own drop down menu, for example : If I really want to show all the Easysocial menu from the drop down menu, I can build one set one Easysocial menu from Joomla backend menu management page, then go to drop down menu configuration page select this 'custom menu' to display on my frontpage drop down menu. (screenshot : http://screencast.com/t/vwynZmhUVB )

Actually regarding with your input above, that was make sense also, perhaps you can submit a feature request regarding this in our voice page -> http://stackideas.com/voices/easysocial , so that we will see if we can implement for another new option to use all the default Easysocial menu, so that user can easier to get rid of the toolbar from the Easysocial page.

Hi Arlex,

OMG ... it feels to me like you don´t like to understand us.
But whatever, I will explain it step by step, okay?

The dropdown in the new navbar looks like this:


How can this be rebuilt with a normal Joomla Menu?

The old version looks like this:



How can this be rebuilt with a normal Joomla Menu?

I do not really see a sense in putting a Joomla-Menu under the user-account. The onliest menu making sense there is the Account-Menu. But well ... it´s good to have options.

Your decision to put a normal Joomla-Menu there would have been a nice feature, if you would have integrated the neccecary user-menu first! But in the moment there is no user-menu. All has to be built up manually. And is not looking as nice as your default menus. So why don´t you just put in the option there to use the user-menu?

But back to the main topic:
Did you understand what I wanted to tell you? It´s not about shadows, it´s about variations.

Here are four examples of four stream-items:









Can you tell me where the differences are?
These are ALL YOUR FOUR TEMPLATES!
The differences are minor. "Dark" has a dark background.
But where are the differences between wireframe, elegang and frosty?

And where are other variations?

In addition to that, the stream-items are clumpy, have very low contrasts and take a damend lot of space. I know some people love it like it is. I´m one of the others. And I don´t want to force anybody to change it ... I am only begging for you to understand, that it makes sense to have VARIATIONS!

You have published FOUR TEMPLATES. Where are the DIFFERENCES?

All the best, Julian!

I am sorry for the confusing in earlier, I thought one of the point above you mentioned the notification and drop down module, by the way, thanks for took your time to explained again.

Regarding the stream item only look different in dark theme currently, the rest only different with the Easysocial toolbar and profile page.
Elegant - http://screencast.com/t/Yxb1JHtfXai
Frosty - http://screencast.com/t/IH0JdoHoeh
Wireframe - http://screencast.com/t/K0a8FXihG

Yes, I am agree with this, I will share your feedback to our team as well.

Hi Arlex,

and please excuse me for getting a little bit frustrated in my words. Since I started with EasySocial I am waiting for improvements on this topic, so sometimes I wonder what the best way is to convince you about adding some NEW templates.

By the way ... I see no need to create templates like wanderers or elegant. There are millions of Joomla-Templates out there. I see a much bigger need in developing ES-Templates. This would improve EasySocial and this is your Focus!

It seems to me like it´s really about understanding, that your customers will do DIFFERENT things and have DIFFERENT taste. The navbar is perfect for anybody who want´s to use a navbar. But whenever a person cares more about the general layout, the navbar is unbelievable unhandy and breaking lots of things.

I really love the combination of the notification-icons with the drop-down-meno for login. It fullfills all my personal wishes to a good navigation:

1. It´s nearly invisible and takes neraly zero space
2. It´s there when you need it. No need to search for it
3. It can be shown on every page, not only on ES-pages.
4. It matches all designs, no matter what joomla-template
The onliest missing point is ... the menu.

I totally understand that this kind of menu is not your favorite. You prefer the menu in the navbar. The point is: How much customers are you potentially loosing only because of not having different templates there?

I remember the Tigracon-Template for Jomsocial, which was looking phantastic. Unfortunatelly they haven´t got a demo online anymore, but theire options for the stream where phantastic!

They had 5 or 6 different templates only for the stream.
One had boxes with the names on the side. Another one was a two-column-layout. Another one had a line in the middle and a little graphic that aligned the stream-items around the timeline in the middle. Another one was clean and simple. They just had very nice and very different options.

A simple example:
Most of the templates had the user-avatar on the left. But others had it in a squared box (like a diamond) in the middle. And one template had only a small circle with the user-avatar, but it had a mouse-over that enlarged the image.

Sure, this are things that are not liked by everybody. This is why Joomla has templates. This is why Kunena has templates. This is why Windows has Skins. This is why iPhones have all kinds of customizations of the lock-screen.

ES also has templates.
What I am begging for was just:
Please understand, that we all respect your taste, but there is also a non-minor number of users that love EasySocial but they have a different taste in layout.

Here is the deal:
Make a little lottery! Ask your customers to provide you with graphical conzepts for the stream-items. They should hand it in as an image. You publish them all and let your cusotmers vote about the best concept. With this strategy you can easily test different templates, you see about what your customers want, you get lots of ideas and ES could improve a lot by getting this feedback from the outside.

And it doesn´t cost you anything.
I would maybe offer a free plan-upgrade for all winning-concepts.


All the best, Julian!

Hi Arlex,

a little addition:
I just looked and it seems like I have an old version of tigracon here.
If I also have a matching Jomsocial-installation-package, if you like I would install a dev-page for you so you can simply look at all the variations of the stream.

It´s only to give you some ideas.


All the best, Julian!

Hey Julian,

That was obviously right with your ideas above. We love to heard all the feedback from our customer, so that we can do something cool stuff in the future.

For now it would be better if you can submit a feature request regarding this in our voice page http://stackideas.com/voices/easysocial , so that when the user look at this feature, they might give some feedback and vote it. When our developer come to Easysocial voice page, they will combine all the feature again and see which feature is priority to develop it.

And I believe our designer will come out some different design in the future and share to us then get some feedback from us. At that moment I will try my best request to show some new layout in our forums, so that our customer have opportunity to give more feedback on this if we have come out new design layout in the future.

Because all our developer/designer still focus on Easydiscuss 4 right now, once we finish everything in Easydiscuss 4, we will start focus on Easysocial development.

Perhaps you can share with us as you mentioned above that Tigracon club template which provide to Jomsocial before, so that I can share to our team and see is it can get some concept from this and come out different cool layout in the future?

By the way, thanks for your input