Book Image

Creating Templates with Artisteer

By : Jakub Sanecki
Book Image

Creating Templates with Artisteer

By: Jakub Sanecki

Overview of this book

Designing good looking, professional quality web templates or building your own website are rather complicated tasks, demanding a lot of technical and graphical expertise. Artisteer has changed this situation, enabling you to do it by yourself, without the need to learn skills such as HTML, web-programming languages, or drawing."Creating stunning Templates with Artisteer" is a practical, step-by-step guide that will show you how you can prepare an elegant, professional looking website, on your own, using features of Artisteer. It also describes the process of designing templates for various popular CMS platforms like WordPress or Joomla!, by giving you practical hints, showing how to install those templates and how to import the content into CMS. "Creating stunning Templates with Artisteer" leads you through the process of designing a website, including all standard layout elements, from header to the footer, including menus and special boxes. You will learn how to prepare the templates, store them and export them in the form of ready-to-use HTML pages or packages that can be installed in various CMS platforms such as WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal, or DotNetNuke. The last part of the book shows you some tips and tricks that allow you to extend standard themes generated by Artisteer for enriching the website with image gallery, combining two menus, and more.You will learn how to create a professional quality website or CMS template on your own, with the use of Artisteer with minimal technical difficulties.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Joomla! templates


Joomla! is a very popular CMS, written in PHP language. To be able to use it, you will need a hosting account that supports PHP and access to one database on MySQL database server. Joomla! is a free, open source software, licensed under the terms of GPL 2, which simply means that you can use it free of charge for commercial purposes too (you can find text of this license at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html). You can download the newest version of Joomla! installer from www.joomla.org. While I'm writing this book, the newest, long-term, stable version is 2.5.9, and this is the version we are going to work with in this chapter.

Template Areas

Artisteer-generated Joomla! templates contain the following Areas:

Source: www.artisteer.com

If you look closely at the figure, you will see that every area has two names. The first name is associated with the area's destination, while the second name is given in brackets and is built on the position-number pattern (that is, position...