I guess it's been a long time coming but, as more and more sites need to be upgraded to the latest Joomla versions, I finally put together a starter template using the best practices I have built up over the past 6 years of helping people speed up their Joomla websites and helping them share their content over social networks.
What started as something to make my own life easier grew exponentially to include all the things I thought should be included in normal templates but never was. JoomlaPure is everything I need to build a marketable website for any company without having to limit design.
The benefits are too many to list here, and was even too much to go in to in-depth on the website. This is not all without cost though. There aren't hundreds of module positions bundled with the template as you are expected to create your own layout. A demo layout is provided that includes a couple of positions used to demonstrate certain features and comes out looking a little like the demo marketing page.
It won't appeal to purists or general developers, but to those who know what is going on beyond their screens, it could be a free (and great) step in the right direction.
As far as my tests have gone, it is THE fastest Joomla 3 template ever created! This comes down to more than minimal markup, anyone can make a template that just outputs a Joomla article and nothing more and call it fast.
Some of the things that enable a site running on JoomlaPure to run stupidly quickly.
- Strip unwanted core Joomla code
- Move script to the bottom of the page
- Use of the Purecss framework developed by Yahoo and the ability to load only the parts you need
- Automatic image resizing, lossless compression and caching
- Mobiledetect for device specific content and stylesheets
- Lazyloading social buttons
- CDN option for images and scripts
- Extra .htaccess file included for leverage browser caching and gzip compression
In adition to the speed benefits, JoomlaPure also has additional options for social media.
- Automatic OpenGraph tags for articles
- Twitter cards with an option to use the gallery, photo and summary cards (username extracted from the contact component)
- Automatic Google authorship using the contact component
- Google publishership
- Lazyloading social buttons that work with and without JavaScript
Some additional seo benefits
- Microdata for publishing times, authors, titles, featured images, breadcrumbs
- WAI-ARIA landmarks for banner, navigation, main, contentinfo, form and search
- Included .htaccess file allows:
- Rewriting of sitemap components to /sitemap.xml
- Force or remove the www. prefix
- Permanently redirect the duplicate /home page
- Remove potentially damaging canonical urls
- Custom 404 page that can email you with the refering page and the page the viewer was trying to visit
- Ability to add 3rd party comments from the template options
For more information you can check it out at pure.robertwent.com