Joomla! 1.5: A User's Guide: Building a Successful Joomla! Powered Website
A Quick Look at Joomla! Templates
June 18, 2009
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Joomla!is an emerging open source CMS with a lot of potential and support. In this lesson we look at Joomla! templates and tableless design.
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What Is a Joomla! Template?
A Joomla template is a series of files within the Joomla CMS
that control the presentation of content. A Joomla template
is not a website; it's also not considered a complete
website design. A template is the basic foundational design
for viewing a Joomla website. To produce the effect of a
"complete" website, the template works hand-in-hand with
content stored in Joomla databases. Figure 9.1 shows an
example of this.
Click here for larger image
Figure 9.1 - A template with and without content.
Figure 9.1, part A, shows a template in use with sample
content. Part B shows the template as it might look with a
raw Joomla installation and little or no content. The
template is styled so that when your content is inserted, it
automatically inherits the styles from stylesheets defined
in the template, such as link styles, menus, navigation,
text size, and colors, to name a few.
Notice that the images associated with the content (the
photos of the people) are not part of the template, but the
header is.
Using a template for a CMS, as Joomla does, has a number
of advantages:
Joomla does all the work of placing content within pages.
You can add new information to existing blog pages simply by
typing a new article. The template and its CSS make sure it
appears stylistically consistent with other content on the
site.
There is a complete separation of content and
presentation, especially when CSS is used for layout (as
opposed to having tables in the index.php file). This is one
of the main criteria for determining whether a site meets
modern web standards. In a standards-compliant site, the
HTML tags for tables are reserved for presenting tabular
data and not laying out a page into columns.
You can apply a new template, and hence a completely new
look to a website, instantly. This can involve different
locations for positioning content and modules, as well as
colors and graphics.
The least you need to know - Modern websites
separate content from presentation by using templates and
CSS. In Joomla, a template controls the presentation of
content.
What Is a Joomla! Template?
The Localhost Design Process
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