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New Joomla! Book is 'Packt' With Template Design Tips

Our friends at Packt Publishing are at it again, this time with a book devoted to Joomla! Template Design.

Aimed at getting the reader up to speed on creating professional quality templates, Joomla! Template Design covers nearly all aspects of designing website templates on the award winning Joomla! PHP CMS.

The Joomla! template system is a series of files within the Joomla! CMS that serves as the basic foundation for the presentation layer of a Joomla! website. Furthermore, the system controls the layout and display of the content contained with a Joomla! database.

A recent announcement from the Joomla! development team, stating that they are committing themselves to the GPL license, has caused some confusion concerning the distribution of templates. This stems from the fact that a template package is made up of various files - and while some of the templates are GNU GPL friendly, unfortunately others are not.

Joomla!’s official stance is that non-code elements of a template package may be licensed in any way an author deems fit, since it’s just data acted-upon by the software. This position suggests that more users will now need to create their own professional-level templates.

Cue the hero music as the new offering from Packt swoops in to save the day.

Joomla! Template Design is meant to be an easy-to-use, and complete, guide to creating Joomla! templates for a website. The book includes the following topics:

• Details for setting up a basic workflow
• Debugging and validating template code
• Creating drop-down menus
• Creating interactive and dynamic forms for a site

The book also covers how to deal with and use multiple templates in the same site, advising users on creating attractive designs using CSS rather than tables for layout. Animations and other effects are also covered, as well as tricks for tweaking existing templates.

Joomla! Template Design is aimed at web designers interested in creating their own unique templates for Joomla. Basic knowledge of Joomla! and some knowledge of CSS and HTML, as well as experience using Dreamweaver for coding purposes, are recommended.

Interested? Swing by the Packt Press website for a closer look. And if you have a view on the book or the GPL licensing confusion, talk to us.

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