Book Image

Joomla! 1.5x Customization: Make Your Site Adapt to Your Needs

Book Image

Joomla! 1.5x Customization: Make Your Site Adapt to Your Needs

Overview of this book

Setting up a basic Joomla! Web site is easy; what comes next is hard and expensive ñ making the site do exactly what and look exactly how you want. With this book in hand, it is easy to adapt your site to bring your vision fully to life. This book will help you to separate your site from the crowd of other Joomla! sites without having to invest in developers. It will guide you through how to customize different parts and aspects of your site and will also show you how to turn your site into a profitable business via these customizations. You will be able to build a successful, professional web site that will adapt to all your business needs. You will be taken beyond the basics of Joomla!, and given an insight into the techniques and tools used by the professionals to rapidly develop unique, custom sites. This will enable you to develop your own professional-quality Joomla! site without assistance, saving you time and money. You will learn how modules, plugins, components, and templates are constructed, and how to make changes in them, giving you the confidence to make more elaborate changes to your site. On top of this will be a look at common problems Joomla! site developers face and how best to deal with them. You will also learn techniques for building a business with Joomla!, as you step through building a subscription-based web business. Towards the end, you will look at marketing and monetizing this business fully to maximize your return.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Joomla! 1.5x Customization
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Modifying a template


Before we look at modifying a template, we need to choose a template for our sample site.

There are many free and commercial templates out there, and originally I intended to choose a template that we could distribute with the book, but after looking at some of the clubs I mentioned above, and knowing that our site is going to be a real site, I found the Vertigo template at Rocket Theme, and it fits really well with our sample site plans. Our site is aimed at helping people with housing and real estate, so something that feels light and open, like a well-designed house, will probably feel better for our customers, putting them in a good mood while browsing the site. The cloudy style with the light blue, white, and green definitely captures this feeling well.

However, as mentioned above, we want to make at the very least some image changes to our template so that it is more personal and isn't immediately recognizable as a template. Unfortunately, the parallax effect at...