After our recent big Quark release that introduced the new restaurant style, it’s time to get back into the swing of delivering fixes and other minor additions to make Quark better than ever. The new Quark version 1.1.1 corrects a few discovered bugs and delivers some interesting new features we hope you’ll enjoy!
Page preloader
A page preloader effect has been added; this means that when opening the website or switching between its subpages users will see a charging animation. A simple addition, but one that adds an extra layer of sheen to the overall feel of a site.
Two preloader graphics are included as standard, and you may also add your own graphics by uploading them to the images/preloaders folder of the Quark template folder of your Joomla installation. Any images added here can be then chosen via the Additional effects tab in the template settings.
Login popup
A feature that many users have been asking for! To add a login popup to your Quark-based site you’ll need to do two things:
- Set the login module to the login position
- Create a menu item which is then linked to the popup – to do this you must set its class to gk-login-popup using the additional parameters plugin for the menu item
Better script management
Since additional effects and animations are constantly added to Quark, you may find that there are too many scripts running for things you don’t want to use, slowing down your site. To combat this we’ve created a tab which allows for quick and easy management of the theme effects script. With this feature, you can disable any unnecessary JavaScript libraries to speed up proceedings:
Changing the photo order in the PhotoSwipe gallery pop-up
In previous versions of Quark the PhotoSwipe gallery script scrolled through images in the pop-up according to the order they were added in the code for the page, which made things hard to manage when dealing with a large number of images in multi-column layouts since the order was not intuitive.
With this new update you can add an attribute to your image tags, data-order . The value assigned to this attribute will affect the image order of the items in the gallery when scrolling through the pictures in the pop-up.
Note! There are two things to remember when using this feature; numbering is carried out starting from a value of 1, and if you decide to use the data-order attribute you must ensure that all images have the attribute with a unique value assigned to prevent issues.
VK and LinkedIn social media links added
We’ve added support for two more popular social networks and also added options to enable or disable links in the link share button popup:
Other improvements
In addition to the above functions, we’ve made a number of minor improvements and fixes:
- Added read more links to K2 Category View and com_content
- Improved mechanism for overriding the template after the changes introduced in Joomla! 3.4
- Improved the behavior of image logos on mobile devices
- Fixed inconsistencies in the names of options and their default values
- Improved the parallax effect when you change the size of the browser window
What’s next?
We’re still not done improving Quark, so if there are any features you’d dearly like to see implemented let us know in the comments and we’ll take everything into consideration as we continue development; your feedback is invaluable to us so don’t be shy!
Before we release the next new style for Quark we plan to release another minor version update, v.1.1.2, which will again introduce some helpful new features and fix any bugs that have cropped up in the meantime.
Download: Quark Template v.1.1.1