Up and Running with Joomla, 2nd Edition

Selecting a Template

Templates, which are accessible from the Extensions menu in the Joomla Administrator, are probably one of the easiest things to understand conceptually in Joomla. Templates contain the code that represents your site design—it's a skin. Joomla has support both for Site and Administrator templates, which means you can have one template for your core site and something different for the Joomla Administrator. You can even apply templates to specific pages, which can be handy if you want your homepage to look slightly different than the rest of your site. Or perhaps you need landing pages for various content Sections on your site—think of a sports site with different looks for football, soccer, basketball, and baseball for instance.

Note

We cover details on how to create your own templates later in the Short Cut. Right now out intent is to just get you familiar with the important aspects as an administrator.

That being said, not all templates are created equal—and we speak from experience. As we both started using Joomla heavily, we quickly found out that some templates were not coded properly. We also found out that creating our own templates required a rather in-depth knowledge of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), HTML, and how Joomla worked. Although many of you may have a lot of CSS and HTML experience, like we do, ensuring consistency across browsers is not always easy—especially when newer browsers, like Internet Explorer 7, introduced a whole new world of problems ...