Joomla! 1.6 Template Guide

Comment by Amy Stephen on October 29, 2009 at 9:38am

Please join in and help with the Template portion of the Joomla! 1.6 Users Guide. Tony will share more information about how to get started.

Comment by Tony Davis on October 29, 2009 at 10:18am

Amy, Sorry to ask but what do you mean by Template?

In WikePedia it means both

- Look and Feel Templates - personally although I like playing with CSS etc I do not want to go there. It might be that eventually there should be a look and feel to the 1.6 User Manual but later.

- Factoids - I am a bit stuck for words here because of the dual use of Template. They mean that you can have something which every time you refer to Title field or a Position drop down menu you do not retype or cut or paste but insert a tag/ a substitution marker and that will be replaced by the single factoid held in the Template. Since most of the Backend pages have a rather similar structure this approach means that I can provide boiler plates with all these bits in place and the contributor only has to add a brief note if it is warranted because, in this particular context, there is something different about it.

If you mean the second we need to be inventive and think of a new title.

But I do not think it is a big job because most of this already appears in the Help pages which seem to live in the Docs.joomla.org space.

All that said, I agree with the thought that more targets gain more recruits.

When Chris starts getting back to me I will get his view on all this too.

Cheers

TD

Comment by Amy Stephen on October 29, 2009 at 10:38am

Good - for Joomla! folks, "Templates" has solid meaning and there is a pretty well defined group of people who are better known for those skills. As you have noted, there is existing material of various degrees of usefulness already on the Wiki for Templates. In some cases, it might simply take a bit of updating and including in this guide.

Mainly, the process you and Chris are following for organizing the pages, etc., for the User's Guide will work for the Template folks, too. It will help people "grab a section" and document it - and allow you guys to guide it's overall shape.

Keep up the excellent work.

Comment by HarryB on October 29, 2009 at 11:00am

Joomla! templates define what a number of other projects use use two terms to describe: templates and themes. What they call templates are typically more or less the equivalent of Joomla!'s index.php and template override files. What they call themes are typically the equivalent of Joomla!'s template.css file.

Comment by Amy Stephen on October 29, 2009 at 11:40am

Tony - meet HarryB. HarryB - meet Tony. :)

Tony - HarryB is a long-time Joomla! community member, was involved with Mambo, and also has a lot of experience with Drupal and WordPress. (Plus, he's an operating system/networking geek with similar backgrounds as you and I have in IT.)

He is also someone who has written Template documentation in the past. When we moved from 1.0 to 1.5, HarryB helped figure out the crosspath between new and old methods. We are not looking at significant changes for 1.6 in this templating.

HarryB is an excellent resource on this topic and I'm glad to see him here.

/me locks the door on the Group so he cannot escape. :)

Comment by Ron Severdia on October 30, 2009 at 12:07am

I just having this same discussion earlier today about nomenclature. Within Joomla, "templates" is commonly understood to mean the collection of files that comprise a look. That collection of files resides within a single template folder in the "templates" directory of a Joomla installation. Within the individual template folders, you'll see a Template Main Page, and maybe multiple Template Stylesheets (among other files).

WIth Joomla 1.6, there will be a new dimension to templates—styles. This means you can create a series of template parameters and save this configuration as a "style." Then assign a style within menu item parameters. This allows for individual page designs. These are somewhat functional in the latest alpha so you can play and test them out.

Comment by Frank Dwyer on October 31, 2009 at 11:02am

The capability for individual page designs will be very nice. I am looking forward to 1.6 and need to learn the the new requirements for template design.

Comment by Kevin[R] on January 4, 2010 at 12:44pm

Didnt Joomla 1.0.x have this capability to assign different templates per page but vanished in 1.5....I thought it was a great feature.

Comment by Bo Astrup on January 4, 2010 at 1:10pm

you can still assign different templates to different menu items /pages in 1.5 however the 1.6 way of doing it is much 'smarter' as it will significantly lower the numbers of files needed for a site, makes it easier to maintain the template/theme and possibly lower page download times.

Comment by Kevin[R] on January 4, 2010 at 1:27pm

Just found a video on how to do it in 1.5, thanks for the heads up.

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