Book Image

Joomla! 1.5 Templates Cookbook

Book Image

Joomla! 1.5 Templates Cookbook

Overview of this book

Templates in Joomla! provide a powerful way to make your site look exactly the way you want either using a single template for the entire site or a separate template for each site section. Although it sounds like an easy task to build and maintain templates, it can be challenging to get beyond the basics and customize templates to meet your needs perfectly.Joomla! 1.5 Templates Cookbook consists of a series of self-contained step-by-step recipes that cover everything from common tasks such as changing your site's logo or favicon and altering color schemes, to custom error pages and template overrides. It starts off with the basics of template design and then digs deep into more complex concepts. It will help you make your site more attractive and user-friendly. You will integrate your site with various social media such as Twitter and YouTube; make your site mobile-friendly with the help of recipes for creating and customizing mobile spreadsheets; and use miscellaneous tricks and tips to get the most out of your website. You get all of this in a simple recipe format that guides you quickly through the steps and explains how it all happened.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Joomla! 1.5 Templates Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface

Understanding the templateDetails.xml file


The templateDetails.xml is vital for your Joomla! template to function correctly. It defines the metadata of your template. There are three fundamental things that this file tells Joomla!:

  • Information about the author of the template (that's you!)

  • The files that are used within the template

  • The positions that Joomla! uses to position content within the template

The templateDetails.xml file can also provide information about a theme's color variations and other parameters.

Getting ready

If your template does not already have one, create a templateDetails.xml file in your template's directory. For example, if your template was called ch2-test, this would be in the templates\ch2-test directory.

How to do it...

Before we begin, we need to define a few things in our file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE install PUBLIC "-//Joomla! 1.5//DTD template 1.0//EN" "http://www.joomla.org/xml/dtd/1.5/template-install.dtd">
<install version...