How Do Templates Work With Your Joomla Site?

How Do Templates Work With Your Joomla Site?

Joomla is an award-winning open source CMS (content management system) that allows anyone to build a professional site quickly and easily, even if they've never built a website before. Joomla has a number of free plugins that help you extend the power and is a great tool for developers of any skill level.

How Does Joomla Handle Design?

Joomla templates are controled by a array of files that allow you to completely control the look and feel of your site simply by editting a couple of files. If you aren't a great designer there is nothing to worry about. Fortunately there are many Joomla templates around that you can make use of and several are even free. If one of these templates doesn't work for you, you can also make your own template which allows for the utmost control.

Joomla templates allow for anyone, regardless of their level of knowledge, to easily maintain their dynamic website.

What's The Secret Behind Joomla Templates?

When someone visits a page on your site, Joomla searches the database for all information that is relevant to that page. This information includes not just the main content item they are after, but also the menus and other modules that should be shown. Then, using your template's code, Joomla figures out where everything should be displayed.

To make things as easy as possible, Joomla allows for controlling the look and feel of your site using just two kinds of files; CSS and HTML. The HTML controls where elements are placed on the page while the CSS controls the design elements like colors.

Changing any images in the template you need is very simple. Since the image files are ordinarily linked in the HTML files you just need to go in and point the image call to the location of your new image file. If the new image isn't the same size as the image it's replacing you can cause some weird errors.

Just start your process by downloading any freely available Joomla template and then customize it from there. Before long you'll have a great looking website.

How Joomla templates help

In the old days you used to have to hire a web designer who would charge you thousands of dollars for the initial site, then sometimes over $100 just to add a new page to the site. Using templates with Joomla you can avoid all of that expense and easily add new pages whenever you want. It's also incredibly easy to add graphics, music and videos.