Joomla Templates

Joomla seems to be the word on every one's lips at the moment. It is fast becoming the most popular content management system on the Internet, and has a large and growing community to support it. Joomla is basically all about managing and controlling your web site, whether it is a traditional static page, a database run interactive system or a blog. Within the Joomla world there are access to many different templates that you can use depending on your circumstances. You can also create these templates and maybe even give them back to the community for use by others Joomla users. Each template contains many different components which all work together to provide a usable interface for your readers.

Joomla is an open source system and because of this it is freely available online, maybe the best things in life can be free. CSS or cascading style sheets are used extensively within many Joomla templates as they give a graphic designer a great way to separate style and content, and can make a web page look great if used effectively. Joomla is very open ended and can be used to do whatever you want it to. Templates are one way to access the flexibility of Joomla and can make the development process much easier.

There are many different Joomla templates in existence, and most of them are available free of charge. A template is not the entire web site, it is not even the entire design of the web site but is a foundation that can be added to and personalised by the developer. You can work together with the Joomla system, a Joomla template and your own content and design ideas to create the final page. PHP commands are used a lot on Joomla websites and will have a huge effect on what the end user sees. Their are also extensive tools which can allow a developer to create their own Joomla templates.

To design a Joomla template the developer will have to do the coding with HTML and CSS directly, they can not use a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get ) editor such as Dreamweaver. This may make the template design procedure restrictive to some people. Another potential difficulty is that the design process and the viewing and checking of this design can not go hand in hand. A developer first has to do the design and save it on a text editor, and then it needs to be loaded on a server and checked in a web browser. This process can get rather tiresome after a while if you do not know what you are doing. There are a number of different components which all add up to create Joomla templates.

There will generally be a large number of different components that you have created with your template, and these all need to be accessed and installed by the user of the template. There may be javascript and flash components, security, images, and of course the information about the designer and the instructions of use. All in all, Joomla is a great system which can be made easier with the use of templates and still retain the flexibility for which it is renowned.