By Aidan Cougnlan on Wednesday, 03 June 2015
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Hi folks,

I help run a small association website using primarily Easyblog & Kunena as the main content provision (with calendar & event registration component & a few others suporting it). We have jomsocial installed, but most activity goes on in Kunena or Easyblog comments, so we hid most of jomsocial as much as we could. The problem with developing Joomla sites without a dedicated web designer on board is that it ends up looking like a bunch of separate piece of software hooked together (*even* if they all come from the same developer, like Stackideas!).

I'm looking to upgrade to latest stackideas extensions and move to a responsive Joomla news/magazine template that supports Easyblog & Easydiscuss, with the intention of migrating Kunena to Easydiscuss. We would also consider replacing Jomsocial with Easysocial, but I'm not convinced of the need for either on our site (would make sense if Easysocial used Easydiscuss as it's core discussion engine), we might just remove it - neverthless it would be good to have support in case we change our mind.

Are there any good responsive news/magazine templates out there that could give us a decent business-like newsy UI with support for front-page news display of Easyblog content, and styling of Easyblog and Easydiscuss (and potentially Easysocial) to be usable on desktop, iPad and mobile phones?. Most of the good news/mag themes seem to support only Jooma & K2 articles, I've found a few that support Easyblog - but not necessarily Easydiscuss, and a few the other way round. Trying to find one that supports both (or all) the stackideas extensions in a news template, with iPad & phone support seems almost impossible.

So.. please help with any pointers.... are there any good reference sites that use the Stackideas extensions together in a holistic way - I'd love to see how they handle content display & styling on different devices.

Any chance of a good kick-ass responsive reference template like this covering all the extensions from Stackideas ? Failing that, a good directly/list of all third party templates that support stackideas extensions would be very handy - apologies if it's there somewhere, couldn't find it.

best regards,
Aidan.
Hi Aidan,

Thank you for your inquiry. I can't really think of any exact News template for both EasyBlog and EasyDiscuss. However, I do manage to find 2 templates that looks pretty neat for both component; JSN Corsa and Purity III, from JoomlaShine and Joomlart respectively.

You can also check out our Partners' page for any template houses, they actively create templates for our component.

Hope these provides some stepping stones for you to get the best template for your site. Do share with us your findings!
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Wednesday, 03 June 2015 12:53
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Thanks Ahmad.

Yes, I had come across JSNCorsa and Purity III. JSNCorsa doesn't have a news feed style home page. Purity does have a Magazine layout, and looks very clean & simple, but as far as I can gather the magazine layout doesn't seem to support Easyblog - only K2 articles!. (Like almost every news/magazine template out there).

Lack of template support is the single biggest thing prevent me from upgrading Easyblog & moving our Kunena forum to Easydiscuss - worth looking into it to see if there's anything you guys can do to encourage more support from template developers - or to make Easyblog content more easily accessible to template developers if that's what's preventing it.
I had hoped Rockettheme would have something (since their Roksprocket apparently supports Easyblog), but they said they have no Easyblog/Easydiscuss styling in any of their templates.

I'll keep looking and come back & let you know if I find anything suitable though!

best regards,
Aidan.
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Wednesday, 03 June 2015 15:12
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Hi Aidan,

I agree that templates are very important in developing sites; no matter how stable a component is, or how many features it has, by the end of the day it boils down to UX/UI of the interfaces. Thank you for your suggestion, we will keep in touch with our template house partners and will get something out, especially for EasyBlog 5.

Meanwhile, do share with me your findings.
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Monday, 08 June 2015 12:04
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BTW, you could just use Minitek Wall to get the "Magazine style" layout for your site, independent of theme - http://extensions.joomla.org/extension/minitek-wall
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Friday, 23 September 2016 22:36
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Thanks for sharing this
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Saturday, 24 September 2016 17:23
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I have been very happy with http://www.JoomlaBamboo.com

They just underwent an ownership change but the team is still intact and has actually grown. They look to be about ready to deliver some top notch templates. Check them out and see if you like them. I would suggest you go with a ZenGrid5 Framework template like Build.r. I am planning to use their next template calle Colourshift2 when they release it next week.

Sean Carney
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Monday, 10 October 2016 08:07
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Thanks for sharing Sean
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Monday, 10 October 2016 10:21
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