MAESTRO - Creative Template Designer

Drop down Menu Generator

Now you can make drop down menus in Maestro and with one click export that menu in your Joomla template. We provide tool to create custom, cross browser compatible CSS menus. Our menu generator makes it easy to create custom CSS menus without having to know programing at all. We embed Drop down menu module in Maestro. This module (Drop down - Menu Generator) makes css menu entirely using CSS and with use Joomla HTML markup without javascript. Great thing about this menu is that works in Joomla without any modification. You don't need to manualy change links or alias or enything else, it will be driven from Your Joomla menu. Any change in Joomla menu will be reflected immeadatly in browser. CSS menus benefit from being accessible and search engine friendly. Since they do not rely on javascript, they have good cross platform accessibility and degrade gracefully, if a browser does not support the CSS variant, or has javascript and CSS disabled, the links are still perfectly usable.

Menus from Maestro are:

• - Full Accessbility (cross browser, search engine accessibility, simple keyboard accessibility and graceful degredation).
• - Multi-level menu - ie the ability to have submenus up to n levels. These menus are built using nested ul and li tags.
• - All presentation configured by CSS (no javascript config files for presentation).

The list of features are as follow:

1. Menu is CSS based but if you want you can choise some fancy jQuery stuff
2. This menu is cross browser and support all modern browser and Internet Explorer
3. Search Engine Accessble (no links or text served as javascript files).
4. Simple Keyboard Accessiblity - using tabs and enter.
5. Menu have Graceful Degredation - when some browser not support CSS and javascript are disabled menu will display links and text
6. Unlimited levels - supports unlimited levels of menu (although unlikely you need more than 4 levels).
7. Option to automatically add indicator when menu node has submenu attached.
8. All presentation in CSS file - this includes relative positioning of the submenu, or submenu widths.
9. Animated submenu .
10. Option to control how submenu animations appears (slide, fade, etc).
11. Ability to put more than one menu on a page .
12. Time delay when mouse is in "mouse out" position
13. Additional geometry which is imposible with css only solution (when you check JS options)
14. Click for drop down (for mobile devices)

Carousel in Joomla

In Joomla Carousel Slider Maker module you will get these options:
- Browse for image from your hard disk.
- Heading text for every image which you insert into module. You can choose font, font size and color for heading text.
- Paragraph text for every image which you insert into module. You can choose font, font size and color for paragraph text.
- Adjust position for images and texts.
- Adjust position for navigation arrows.
- Adjust size of content for carousel.
- Link for every carousel slide. Adjust for speed of carousel slider.
- Adjust for interval of carousel slider.
- Ability to turn on or turn of navigation for the slider (arrows for next and previus slide , naviggation bullets for slides)
- Ability to turn on or turn of auto play for slides.
- You can put more than one carousels on page. Every carousel works in separate div position.
- This module is not Joomla extension and you don't need to go in administrative panel of Joomla.

Everything what you do, you do from Maestro. The module is based on rcarousel Jquery plugin from Wojciech rrh Ryrych.

Slider in Joomla

If you want to make а slider for your Joomla template, an easy way is to use Maestro Creative Template Designer. Maestro has a very powerful module for making full image slider for Joomla templates. You don't have to do any programming, just pick images, determine type of transition between images and transition speed. Everything else Maestro will do for you and it will embed the code in your template. It sounds very easy and it is, and the slider looks really great and your template will get that dynamic look which all best templates on the market have.

In Joomla Slider Maker module you will get these options:

- Browse for image from your hard disk

- Slide caption for every image which you insert into module

- link for every image

- transition effects (Fade, Slide Top, Slide Right, Slide Bottom, Slide Left, Carousel Left, Carousel Right)

- ability to turn on or turn of navigation for the slider (Arrows, Progress Bar, Play button, Slide Counter, Slide Caption, Tray Button , Control Bar)

This slider makes sliding of images in background of layout, so you can make the whole template in front of this slider or use this slider as the template.

The module is based on Supersized Jquery plugin from Build Internet project.

Framework or not?

If you have ever tried to do programming by yourself you’ve seen that it’s not easy. You need to learn a lot of things in order to be able to create just a small thing. If you want to speed up your progress you may want to use some of the frameworks. Wikipedia says that a framework is “a reusable set of libraries or classes for a software system (or subsystem).” Frameworks can really speed up your work but you have to learn how to use them. Powerful frameworks may be very complicated and you will spend a lot of time to get familiar with them. If your goal is to create joomla templates, maybe you don’t need to learn a framework. Maestro is a visual template creator with great possibilities.  In another words, Maestro is a visual framework and you don’t need days to learn the syntax of a framework. With Maestro you need to spend only several hours watching video tutorials and after that you can start creating templates.

What is „PSD to template“?

It's a process in which some design that is usually made with Adobe Photoshop is being converted to a template. The most queries are for the designs to be converted to a HTML site, Wordpress theme or Joomla template. There are many good designers. Much smaller number of designers knows how to convert their design into a programming code that is necessary to get a Wordpress theme or a Joomla template. Very often the designers hire programmers to do this part of the job for them. The price for that job is in the range from 50$ to 150$ for a HTML website, but if you want a Wordpress theme or a Joomla template the price is even higher and starts at 200$. These prices are only for the first page. Each additional page is being charged extra. The best way to convert an image into a template without problems is to use Maestro. Maestro is a software that has a unique algorithm for converting an image into a Joomla template. It's enough to import design (an image) to Maestro and to draw boxes over the image. These boxes are the module positions for the Joomla template. After that you need just one click with mouse and the rest of the job will be done by Maestro. The price for Maestro is smaller than what you need to pay to an agency for a single service "PSD to template". Another great feature is that Maestro doesn't require a PSD file. Maestro works with JPG, PNG and GIF files.

How to create template layout

Currently there is no program on the market that can be compared with the CTD. There are several ways how to create a schedule for modul positions in a template:
Text editor, paper and a pencil. Draw on the paper how the template should look like and then calculate the size of certain positions. This way only the simplest templates can be made and only by the people who have been in this business long enough.
- Using different grid systems and frameworks actually means changing some predefined templates. This way it is much easier to make a template but then again you are pretty limited regarding what you can do.
Creating a template in Adobe Photoshop or Fireworks. This is a good way, although there is one flaw. There are times when these programs are not able to create a template without using the tables which is outdated and pretty bad from the perspective of readability of data by the search engines (Google). Of course, the price for FireWorks is not that small ...
- In our opinion the best way to create a template would be to simply draw it and then assign characteristics to these positions. After that only the names for the modular positions should be assigned and you can click on the Save button. Well, this is how it is done if you use Creative Template Designer to create templates for Joomla CMS.

Who is Maestro CTD intended for?

This question is relatively easy to answer. All who need to create templates for Joomla CMS are the potencial users of this program.In short, Creative Template Designer is a program that is ideal for several groups of people:

- For web designers who are good at their job but aren't professional programmers and don't know how to move their creations into the valid code and to complete a template.
- For the programmers who know how to make a code, but are not good at defining the look of the website.

- For the encoders that provide services of "transfering" the existing design into CMS template (this is popularly called PSD 2 Joomla or PSD 2 template), for who this program will significantly reduce the time needed to complete the job.