The Complete Joomla Tutorial Package (Joomla 1.5 Videos Just Added

The Complete Joomla Tutorial Package. 17 Videos, 400 Templates, 75 Module Addons And How To Create Joomla Templates Ebook. Joomla 1.5 Videos Just Added!

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Use Joomla Templates to Reduce Your Development Time

Just as building a house, building a web site can become one of the most time-consuming tasks of all time. It is sort of disappointing when you have an idea, you are excited about it, you think it is going to work, and you're going to earn lots of money from it, only to be stifled by realizing how much time it's going to take in order to get the web-site up and running. Well, if you're a person or a business that has had this same problem, I may just have an out for you. It is fast - you could have your website up and running in a few days, it is easy - you will not need a web designer to do anything for you, and it's cheap - no more spending thousands of dollars on one single web-site.

The solution? Joomla templates! These templates are going to allow you the freedom of building a personalized website, without all the extra angst and anxiety which is usually incorporated into a standard site. These premium Joomla templates would allow you to pick from a variety of functions, uses, designs, colors and layouts. This practically means you could have almost the same design as someone else, but you can have a completely different layout and color design than them and nobody would be none the wiser that you have a similar web-site!

These days it is vital that your web site is one of a kind. There are so many sites and several individuals online, so if you get a free template you just might have a consumer coming upon your web-site and your competitor's web site in the same day, just for the consumer to realise you have the SAME site. Not very professional is it? But, with a paid design you could become more unique in your options. As pointed out above these are extremely easy to set up. You do not need to be a webs designer, a rocket scientist or a developer to get these websites up and running.

All you need is a domain name, the Joomla CMS installed on your web host, and a template. One thing I would suggest is to join a Joomla template club because this would allow you to buy a club membership for a variety of templates instead of just one template. Important if you have a number of websites online! Once you join the Joomla template club you would be given a choice of some of the best Joomla templates available to you right now, all of which are Joomla 1.5 templates. Then, you just put the code on your web site and voila. You are done.

Now you have a template for your content management system, you look professional, and you got it done in just a few days time instead of a few months. This means you can begin earning money today! Oh by the way, if you join a Joomla template club, you will also be allowed to try out the site before you actually "buy" it or install it on your web-site. Most of the Joomla template clubs which offer the best Joomla templates have a demo option. This way you can see what the site looks like and how it works functionally within the confines of the site. Major time saver!

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Customizing Joomla! Web Templates

Joomla! is an award winning open source content management system which comes with a default website design template. The navigation structure in the default template is very moderate and can be used in the websites for general purpose. Since, now even the big corporate houses, government sites and others have started using Joomla! as a professional platform to launch their websites customization using these templates and the other templates as well, have become frequent/ is quite often.

Even Joomla! customization becomes necessary for the websites that have commercial value attached to them. Businesses using Joomla! as their e-shop or service platform where people can come and place orders or make purchases, customization becomes more obvious. Designing with proper call-to-action and navigation structure is a part of customization only. The next important thing you can work on is the look, feel and presentation of your website depending upon the nature and demography you tend to target.

a) Custom Joomla! Templates

Changing Joomla! templates is not at all difficult. A basic knowledge of Joomla! can help you in changing your desired design template. There are many galleries, blogs and website who offer free Joomla! design template and you can easily install them. But if you are looking for a high end customization then, you definitely require some professional support and help while installation so that you can be saved from the complexities attached. There are many online shops from where you can purchase some finely designed templates as per your requirement.

b) Free Joomla! Templates

Free Joomla! templates are available and can be downloaded for free but you may not find them completely suiting your requirement/s. As far as the customization goes, there is not much scope for professional support to help you get what you actually need. A free design template may bring the possibility to hamper the design of your website, store or community. So be sure while using a free design template.

c) Paid Joomla! Templates

Paid Joomla! Templates are tailored according to your requirement and can be customized to highest degree of your satisfaction. You get full professional support, installation, and look & feel matching to your desire/need.

Things, which you should check while going for a paid Joomla! template:

1: The template must have exactly the same look & feel as you have had dreamt of. It must match the theme of your store, community or website. It should have all the functionality exactly matching to your requirements.

2: The template codes must be flexible enough to tweak to change. And an adjustment to the final layout should not be complex. The codes must be readable and editable.

3: The design must have cross browser compatibility as one of its feature.

Setting up a professional website using Joomla! as a CMS is as easy as getting a high quality and professional looking website design template.

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Joomla Template Tutorial - Changing File Permissions

There may be times when you would like to edit your Joomla template files and this can be done either from within Joomla itself or by editing the file on your computer. For this example let's imagine we want to edit the template.css file of the beez template that comes with Joomla.

Editing Joomla Templates from inside Joomla:

Login to your Administrator area of Joomla

The Control Panel will show

Click Extensions/Template Manager from the Menu bar

The Template Manager will show

Choose the Template you wish to edit i.e beez

The Template Edit page will display

Let's picture you wish to edit the template.css file

Select Edit.css

The Template CSS Editor page will display listing all the css files that are linked with your Joomla web web site

Notice that in most cases all the files will be unwritable.

To amend these files you will need to amend the permissions so that you can change the coding

This is where it becomes a little more complicated especially if you are not familiar with FTP (File Transfer Program)

You will need an FTP product to change the permissions such as Filezilla or you could download a 30 day trial of Dreamweaver

Whichever program you choose, login to your server where you will see a list of files intended for your joomla site

Navigate to the Template folder and then to the folder of the template you wish to change. For this example let's use beez

Select the beez folder and you will notice a folder called css

Choose the css folder and you will see the template.css

If you are using Dreamweaver, right click on the template.css

The Microsoft Windows pop up display will display and you will notice an option called Set Permissions

In support of other programs you will need to read the manual

Choose the Set Permissions option

The File Access Properties screen will display and you will see that the file is set to 755 in other terms it can be read and executed by everyone but not except for the owner of the file

Change the permission to 777 which will give everybody access to read, write and execute the file

Be aware that this file is now vulnerable so you want to alter it back as quickly as you can to 755

Open up your Template Edit Page in Joomla

You may want to refresh the page plus you will now see that your template.css file is writeable

Click template.css and click the edit button

The Template Manager page will display and you can make your amendments

Click the Save button when you have finished your changes

Confirm that your changes have been reflected in your web site

You might need to close the browser and open it once more for you to be able to notice the amendments

Return to your FTP application and set the permissions back to 755 so that your file cannot be written to

The second way of editing your template.css file is to download the file to your PC:

With your FTP application login to your server

Go to to the Template folder and then to the folder of the template you wish to edit. For this example let's use beez

Choose the beez folder and you will notice a folder called css

Click the css folder and you will see the template.css

Download the file to your PC

In Dreamweaver you are able to simply double click on the file

You will not have to worry about permissions

I suggest you create a copy of this file incase you make a mistake so name it something similar to templateBACKUP.css

Open the file and make your amendments

Upload the file back to the original folder. This will overwrite the first file

Refresh your browser and see your amendments.

For further information and tutorials on Joomla check out http://www.joomlainformation.com and for Joomla Templates check out http://www.joomlainformation.com/joomlar-templates.html

How to Choose a Joomla Template?

Joomla design templates can save you time and money when creating a website. You don't even need any design experience to change your website's appearance. Professional web design template can help you a lot if you make right decision when choosing a template. There are thousands of web templates over the Internet and it sometimes it is very difficult to make your choice. Few simple advices can help you choose the best template for your site.

First of all you should analyze your business goals. When you're clear on your goals and know what you want to get from your visitors, you may start creating a website and choosing a template. Keep your mind clear and you will make your search much more efficient and easy with some simple steps that I will provide.

Tips To Choose Best Joomla Template

What Website Do You Need?

Website templates determine a site's structure, look and feel. Do you want to start a blog with mostly text content or some sort of photo gallery? Maybe you need a social network website? Don't forget that your site design should be related to your site's theme and reflect your site's idea. Joomla music template will have a different feel and look than a sport website template, a web development company, or a muscle cars site. Website's structure should meet your site's needs. Do not forget that template is what determines a website's feel and look and it should meet your stylistic requirements.

What Template Layout Do You Need?

You should choose a Joomla template that works the way you need and no complicated changes are required. Template layout is also very important. Layout is what makes your content look the way it looks when you're building a website. Layout is what makes your content look the way it looks when you're building a website. Remember! Choose by a structure - imagine how do you want home page and other pages to look like? Do you want to have images, links and media? Or you want more plain text pages? Do you want an image in your header? Ask yourself all questions you have before ordering a template. Try to avoid templates that look good but too much design work to be done in it to make it suitable for you.

Will You Be Able To Customize The Joomla Template?

Most modern Joomla templates allow you to do necessary changes to make design unique and suitable to your idea. You can change colors, images and fonts and make your website user and SEO friendly. You should make sure that template supports all customization options you may need before buying it. Note to self - customization is a slight improvement but not a total redesign.

Is Customer Support Included?

Professional Joomla templates should be supported by professionals. It doesn't matter if templates are easy to customize and update, but it is always a pain in neck when you cannot get any technical support from experts. Remember what is hard to understand for you is obvious for another and your problem is not a problem at all - just a minor glitch. Make sure you can reach support team when you really need it.

Are Templates Created Professionally?

There are thousands of Joomla templates in the web. Some of them are free, some are paid. Some are poorly designed, some designed professionally. Your website design should attract and be fast to load, be easy to navigate and memorable.

Also important part is cross-browsing and make sure that template is SEO friendly. Best Joomla templates usually are created by designers and developers both. So they make sure that it looks excellent and takes few seconds to load.

Chosen properly a Joomla template can save you money and time. The perfect template for your website is one that will make your site look catchy and clean and will include all features you need.

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What's Exactly a Joomla Template?

If you are a website designer, there's little doubt that you've heard about Joomla templates. But do you really know what's exactly a Joomla template?

A Joomla template is actually a series of files within the Joomla Content Management System (CMS) that control the presentation of the content. So, for all those uninitiated, a Joomla template is not a website in itself nor it represents a complete website design. It's simply a template, i.e., a basic foundation design that'll help you preview your Joomla website. In order to produce the effect of a 'complete website', the Joomla template works in tandem with the content stored in the Joomla databases.

What are the contents of Joomla template? Basically, any Joomla template contains design information, like stylesheets, images, JavaScript, etc. Simply put, Joomla template is a theme or a skin of your Joomla system. However, there can be only one Joomla template per page.

What's the purpose of a Joomla template? What effectively Joomla template does is to command Joomla where to place Components and Modules, and how to display the Modules. You must be well versed with Joomla Modules, as these can be displayed in plenty of variations and each variation is different in its HTML output structure, including the most popular variation output - the XHTML output.

Users of Joomla 1.5 will be well aware of the concept of Joomla Chrome in that version. It is the process where Joomla templates were allowed to skin any component using new Joomla MVC structure. You can found pieces of Joomla Chrome in HTML directory of Joomla template. Undoubtedly, this is one of the most robust additions to the capabilities of Joomla templates.

Why is it called a 'template'? This is because generally, you'll need only one HTML/CSS layout for your entire website. And this 'template' becomes a model for every page on your website. The visitors may be accessing all the pages or just one page of your website, but the same template will be used to design each of these pages. Joomla has sufficient in-built intelligence to incorporate different content from its database into the same template to give a unique appearance to every web page as it'd be presented to the visitors.

The USP of Joomla template is in its architecture, where the design is a separate entity and the content is also a separate entity. While the design is contained in a small group of files, the content is contained in a database. This is a drastic improvement over the practice of creating a bunch of static pages, and each page having different design elements that are repeated for every page. The advantages of this approach include:

1. Flexibility and ease of changing design of your website within a few seconds. All you need to do is simply upload a new template or make necessary changes to the existing one. All the changes will be reflected on all the web pages. For instance, if you want to increase the font-size of a text, all you need to do is edit the CSS and increase the size accordingly, it'd be reflected across all the pages of your website.

2. It makes the backing-up of the content of the site easier. All you need is to download a single database file and you are done for your entire site! There are also some Joomla extensions available that can email a daily database backup automatically.

3. Depending on the variables, content can be accordingly presented. For instance, registered users can be allowed to view additional content than the unregistered ones. Thus, restrictions against non-members can be easily placed with Joomla templates.

W3C and Table-less Design

There are, basically, three essential attributes of a good quality webpage. These are usability, accessibility, and SEO-ability [http://www.prateeksha.com/joomla-seo.html]. In fact, if you take a holistic approach towards web designing, then all these qualities tend to overlap in the sense that is a webpage is usable, it tends to be both accessible and SEO-able. In other words, all you need to do is target one quality and the others will fall in line. Perhaps, the simplest mode of achieving these desirable features in a webpage is to use the framework laid out in the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) web standards.

Take, for example, a site that is structured semantically with XHTML. It'll be easily read with the use of a screen reader by the one who has poor eyesight. Moreover, it can also be easily read by a search engine spider. The working of Google is similar to that of a screen reader in that it does not know how to read your website but it achieves the task.

Basically, Web standards are nothing but a set of rules put in place for use by the web browsers in order to display a webpage. W3C is the organization that is behind the publication of these standards. It is the same organization, whose Director, Tim Berners-Lee, is credited with the inventing the World Wide Web in 1989.

Interestingly, if you ask, say, 10 designers about web standards, you'll most likely get 10 different replies. But one common thing that emerges out of their replies is that these are based on using valid code in any language you use - HTML or XHTML.

Semantically Correct Code

A semantic webpage simply means that XHTML in the webpage describes only content and not presentation. In other words, it means employing a structured organization of H1, H2, H3,... tags and using just tables for tabular data. A semantically correct code does not use layout for tabular data.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

CSS is similar to having semantic code to control the look and layout of a webpage. In effect, CSS is a simpler mode of adding style (like fonts, colors, spacing, etc.) to the webpages. CSS exists parallel to XHTML code and thus, it helps you to separate content from presentation, i.e., semantic code from CSS. A good example of understanding this concept is CSS Zen Garden, a website where the same semantic XHTML is shaped in different and unique ways with different CSS. The net result achieved is the webpages that look very different but have the same core content.

However, you can still take ample steps to ensure that template is accessible (like scalable font-sizes), usable (like clear navigation), and optimized for search engines (like source ordered).

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Joomla Template Clubs

Joomla templates are essentially available wherever you look on the internet. As this program is open source software program, this means that anyone and everyone who can write in HTML coding and CSS coding, can develop extensions of the core functionality of Joomla. This is why the availability of these templates is extremely profound.

You can find an extremely large amount of templates available for free; however, people have found a way to make money off of this technology. The development of these software template clubs are popping up all over the internet.

Because the development of templates can be hard and extremely time consuming, designers are beginning to sell their creations. So now, clubs have formed. Since, single templates can start around $25 dollar per template, and if the consumer wants to keep their website "fresh", the addition of more templates (templates change the look of the front end of the website, the part that the visitors see) can become expensive. The benefits of becoming a club member can prove to be desirable by many webmasters.

With a onetime membership fee, you will have access to numerous templates. You can either join the club for 60, 180 or even 365 days, depending upon which membership you would like to buy. Depending upon the membership that you buy, will determine how much you pay. Costs are cheap compared to the amount of templates that are available. Within that 60 day period (for the 60 day membership) you can download the design that you will want.

Good template clubs are: Rocket theme, which is the longest running template provider; they have been providing Joomla templates for over four years now; Template Plazza; JoomlArt; and Joomlastorm. Through research, I have found that there are 14 Joomla template clubs with 29 providers. By the ratings, Rockettheme and JoomlArt are the top two sites because they provide high quality, professional and innovative templates. If you are looking for a club to join that is going to "stick" around, Rockettheme and JoomlArt are your best options, with Joomlastorm running a competitive race (they are the newbies on the block).

These three websites provide excellent support for their products and you will definitely not be disappointed with the service and quality of their products. If you have been thinking about joining a Joomla template club, start with one of these. You won't be sorry.

No matter which program theme club you decide to join, the benefits can definitely be rewarding. For one low price, you will be able to download as many themes as they have to offer, as many times as you would like, as long as your membership is valid. If you are still not for sure, try the short term membership which has the lowest cost. You can always extend your membership if you do like the program and decide to take full advantage of it. Any way you look at it, you will still get templates for the price you paid for the membership, so what do you have to lose?

Go to Joomla Template Zone to get your free ebook about joomla templates at Joomla Templates. Joomla Template also has information on Joomla Template Clubs along with a lot of other free information. Come by Joomla Template today for free ebooks and other free information that can help you today.

Commercial Joomla Templates - A Buyers Guide

What is Joomla?

Open Source content management systems (popularly referred to as a CMS) are all the rage these days. And with good reason! 5 years ago, the type of functionality that you can get from an open source CMS like Joomla! (www.joomla.org) would have easily set you back $50,000 and required 2 developers and a phd in rocket science to get value out of it! Thankfully systems like Joomla have made webmasters lives a LOT easier when it comes to providing our clients and customers (or our own websites) with an easy to use but powerful CMS for managing our website content.

What are joomla templates?

One of the biggest challenges with a CMS is getting a nice looking template that differentiates your website from the competition. A major challenge with any CMS driven site for someone who is not a skilled web designer is achieving a look and feel that avoids the "sameness" of a lot of CMS driven websites. Luckily Joomla templates are quite easy to build if you're already a skilled designer. If you're not then you are still in luck as there are literally hundreds of Joomla templates out there that will get you up and running in no time. Joomla templates can be grouped into roughly 3 categories:


free joomla templates
joomla template clubs
commercial joomla templates


There are advantages to each group. Free templates are obviously free! Having said that you'll most likely easily find another website using the same template as you pretty easily. If that's not a problem for you then great - off you go! If this is an issue then commercial Joomla templates could be the way to go.

Why commercial joomla templates?

Commercial joomla templates can be of significant value to you as a Joomla website administrator. Key advantages include:


can be of exceptionally high quality - you'll generally find joomla template designers churn out some of the best looking templates for any CMS on the market. But do be careful to ensure the build quality (including HTML/CSS, javacript) is up to scratch. Buyer beware, there are also commercial joomla templates out there who sacrifice quality for quantity! Bestofjoomla.com is a great site for getting great feedback on joomla template designers.
support, support, support - let's face it, your going to want to tweak a logo here, a few colours there and maybe even make some layout changes. That's where a good support network comes into play. Check out the joomla template creators website and make sure you can get support online.
Price - don't get ripped off! You'll find most commercial joomla templates range in price from as low as $10 up to $100 - don't pay any more than that unless you want an exclusive license for the template just for your site - unless you're happy to be potentially ripped off!


Anyways, that raps us up for the moment. If you've not yet had a chance to play would Joomla! I would encourage to check it out - it's a fantastic open source CMS that will run just about any site with ease.

Ed Bloom is nuts about Joomla and has been building Joomla templates since the project was born. Ed is the CEO of the highly successful joomla design agency Joomlacreative.com, which specialises in creating beautiful commercial joomla templates

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