Book Image

Joomla! 1.5 Template Design

By : Tessa Blakeley Silver
Book Image

Joomla! 1.5 Template Design

By: Tessa Blakeley Silver

Overview of this book

<p>Using Joomla! Templates with HTML and CSS allows you to give a unique look and feel to your site, present a "fresh face" to your pre-existing content, ensure that your site design is consistent with your brand, and build a site layout that suits your unique needs. A quality web site is easily within your grasp using these cutting-edge templates. However, even experienced web developers need help to take their designs and turn them into flexible and easily maintainable Joomla! 1.5 templates.<br /><br />The release of Joomla! 1.5 meant a radically enhanced template system that is very different from that of Joomla! 1.0. Joomla! 1.5 comes complete with the ability to create template overrides and customize "module chrome". The Joomla! development team has also revamped the template process by introducing clean, understandable jdoc tags in place of the PHP function-based Mambo-derived markup that Joomla! 1.0 templates used. This book focuses squarely on the new enhancements to the Joomla! 1.5 templating process and walks web designers through the process of turning a working XHTML and CSS "mockup" into a fully functional Joomla! 1.5 template.<br /><br />This well-crafted and easy-to-use book provides you with everything you need to create your own unique Joomla! 1.5 template. It guides you through setting up a basic work flow for Joomla! template design, debugging and validating the template code, creating drop-down menus and dynamic forms for your site, and packaging up your finished template in a ZIP file for users. At the end of this book you will be able to create a template that is effective, flexible, and presents a new look for the pre-existing content.<br /><br />This book focuses on the new jdoc template system for Joomla! 1.5. It is geared toward web designers who need to know how to turn their designs into Joomla! 1.5 templates. It covers how to enhance and speed up your design and revision process, then focuses squarely on the Joomla! 1.5 essentials of creating a template. It covers implementing template overrides, the best approaches for implementing Flash and AJAX techniques, as well as advanced enhancements such as creating design parameters so users can have some control over the template via the administration panel. The original 1.0 book covered how to amend an existing 1.0 template before creating one from scratch, the new templating features of Joomla! 1.5 are so logical to implement we move right into creating a full table-less, semantic XHTML/CSS template from scratch.</p>
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Joomla! 1.5 Template Design
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

About the Reviewers

Harry is a long time Joomla! community member, and has been knocking around the IT industry since the days of punched cards and magnetic tapes. He has spent most of his career as a network systems engineer, fooling around with stuff such as protocols, routing, flow control, and other just as boring networking arcania.

In the real world, Harry has a more-than-passing interest in pickup trucks, country music, open source software, and genealogy. He, his first wife, and two terrible terriers live in Northern Virginia about 20 miles west of Washington, DC.

You can learn more about Harry and what he's currently up to at www.hrpr.com.

You can find him on Twitter as "harryb_hrpr" and on the Joomla Forum as "HarryB".

Niko Kotiniemi is a web developer and web/mobile technology enthusiast living in Jyväskylä, in central Finland. He has worked on developing and maintaining web sites professionally as a freelancer for over three years. Lately, he has also reviewed three Joomla! books for Packt Publishing:"Joomla! E-Commerce with VirtueMart", Suhreed Sarkar, Packt Publishing; "Joomla! Accessibility", Joshue O Connor, Packt Publishing; and"Joomla! Cash", Brandon Dawson, Tom Canavan, Packt Publishing.

Niko Kotiniemi is currently employed as a web designer at the Guidance and Counseling Services for Adults—National Coordination Project (www.opinovi.fi ). Over the past few years, he has been employed by the Federation of Special Service and Clerical employees, ERTO (www.erto.fi )—a labor union whose membership, among others, includes those who work in the private sector in the IT-service industry.

He continues his lifetime computer hobby by studying a Bachelor's degree in software and telecommunications engineering at the Jyväskylä University of Applied Sciences, JAMK. In his spare time, he enjoys the outdoors with his family and friends, or delving into that next ultimate solution or API that will allow applications and web sites to interlink and share information.