Construct Features
Designed For Designers
Construct provides a robust and flexible foundation that allows you to focus on the fun and creative aspects of developing a template. This process is rapidly accelerated as a handful of CSS is all that is needed to produce your unique look. The template's core layout is easily overridden, allowing even more granular control.
Extreme Flexibility
Construct Pro and Construct Unified allow for extended layout overrides; dynamically loaded on a menu item, article, section (in Joomla 1.5 and Nooku Server), category and component basis. Accompanying granular layout control is the ability to add and switch between your custom style sheets. Construct Pro and Construct Unified take this one step further by empowering you to add extended style overrides on the same granular level as extended layout overrides.
Integrated Mobile device Support
Thanks to our friends at The MobileESP Project, Construct supports comprehensive mobile device support utilizing a fast and lightweight detection script. Included is a sample mobile optimized version of the template, with more on the way to be accompanied by the ability to assign which version is used based on the device's capabilities.
Module Positions, Content Columns
Construct ships with 48 module positions, including one for your offline view, each smart enough to dynamically adjust its width depending on how many neighbors it has. Module names are intuitive and self-explanatory, semantically named following HTML5 conventions. Up to 5 content columns are supported and even ships with custom module chrome.
Simple File Structure, Easy to Read Code
By following Joomla's traditional file structure for templates, you can easily and predictably understand what files are located where and what they do. Easing you into the code even more is the extreme attention that has been paid to writing the code in a logical, easily read and understandable manner.
Power of Typography
Construct includes the ability to load up to three instances of 335 Google Web Font variants. Each font is sized to your liking and freely assigned to any set of HTML elements, CSS IDs or classes.
The base typography blends design friendly styles with user friendly accessibility. All sizes are relative to the widely accepted font-size:76%, 12 pixels in modern browsers. Re-declaring this single statement allows you extreme font size control. We've even included a great example of using @font-face using a great font-face kit from the fine folks at Font Squirrel.
Flexible Web Layout
Construct is pre-configured to use a fluid, max-wdith flexible web layout that actively responds to your visitor's screen size. Accompanying this is fluid media support for images and objects such as flash. It even includes max-wdith expressions for Internet Explorer 6. Optional media query support is right around the corner.
If fluid max-width layouts aren't your thing, you can easily change the layout parameters to use a fixed-width layout based on ems, pixels or percent. You can even toggle whether or not the header and footer are the full width of the browser view port. Did we mention that it even includes CSS based sticky footer options?
Theme Me
Taking things one step further is the ability to easily group together sets of extended layout and style overrides, all tied together by your custom style sheets. By switching your custom style sheets, you can switch which extended template overrides are loaded and re-theme your site.
Internet Explorer
Deserving a category of its own, Internet Explorer also gets special attention by Construct. Yes, it supports Internet Explorer 6. It also adds CSS3 support to Internet Explorer 6 and up, with the ability to assign which elements receive this special treatment.
But Wait, There's More...
Packed into this framework are other features like table-less XHTML layouts, multiple styles of CSS based suckerfish navigation, parent item indicators for drop-down and fly-out menus, SEO source ordered content, unobtrusive degradable ajax style sheet switcher, on-page anchor links, "component only index" file for splash and other module-free display applications, editor.css... etc
The best way to really learn what Construct is all about is to try it. Download a free version today and give it a try. When you're ready, come on back and become a member.
Since Construct is built for the sole purpose of providing a great starting point for custom template development, it doesn't need to bulk up on special features and functionalities that serve other purposes. It's here to serve you, and so are we. Your feedback and great ideas drive the passion that goes into making Construct your template framework of choice.
