Product Description

This well-crafted and easy-to-use book is a complete guide to creating Joomla! templates for your website. It guides you through setting up a basic workflow for Joomla! template design, debugging and validating the template code, creating drop-down menus, interactive forms, and dynamic forms for your site, and packaging up your finished template in a ZIP file for users. This book is aimed at web designers who want to create their own unique templates for Joomla!. Readers should have basic knowledge of Joomla! (which can be obtained by working through Building Websites with Joomla!) and also some knowledge of CSS and HTML, and using Dreamweaver for coding purposes.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #343394 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 232 pages

About the Author
Tessa Blakeley Silver's background is in print design and traditional illustration. She evolved over the years into web and multi-media development, where she focuses on usability and interface design. Prior to starting her consulting and development company hyper3media (pronounced hyper-cube media) http://hyper3media.com, Tessa was the VP of Interactive Technologies at eHigherEducation, an online learning and technology company developing compelling multimedia simulations, interactions, and games that met online educational requirements like 508, AICC, and SCORM. She has also worked as a consultant and freelancer for J. Walter Thompson and The Diamond Trading Company (formerly known as DeBeers) and was a Design Specialist and Senior Associate for PricewaterhouseCoopers' East Region Marketing department. Tessa authors several design and web technology blogs. Joomla! Template Design is her first book.

Customer Reviews

A little lightweight
Like other reviewers I was slightly disappointed with this book, though not necessarily just for editorial reasons. At the price point I was expecting at least another 200 pages. Granted this is seems to be a small press book, but even so the content did not seem to justify the price.

Content-wise the book is firmly tethered to Joomla! 1.0. What it does do it does reasonably competently, and it will guide you through the process of creating a version 1.0 template. I felt the book could have used more details on using CSS and how to produce semantic pages to apply the template to. Alan Budd's CSS Mastery title from Friends of Ed does all this in a couple of chapters and a similar effort with this book would have lent weight and value to it.

Perhaps a second edition is on the cards fleshing out the existing content where it is sparse and adding Joomla! 1.5 template creation. Such a book would be closer in value to the current asking price.

Joomla! Template Design - at last, good info on Template design
Initial impressions were less than favourable when it became apparant within a few pages that some over enthusiastic editing appeared to have taken place and the first section or two was full of references to earlier non existent content that had me paging back and forth trying to find it. As a result, it rapdily became somewhat confusing and I was starting to think the book was going to be a serious duffer.

Happily, this seemed a problem only at the beginning with the rest of the book faring rather better. The author wisely starts by showing how to edit an existing template, one of the ones bundled with the default install. The initially confusing relationship between positions of the various blocks that make up a page soon became much clearer with some useful diagrams. The first project essentially changes the banner graphic and changes some basic styles but by doing this it gives an appreciation of the structure and underlying architecture that is needed to go further.

What I particularly liked was the attention to detail such as warnings about which web page editors messed up the DOCTYPE and how to correct it. There is also a lot of wise recommendations such as using Firefox's various extensions to help validate and debug templates during development.

As the book progresses it shows how to build a template from scratch which really helped reinforce the concepts although there wasn't much on how to try to bend Joomla! away from its traditional layout options or at least ways to make it look that way. I liked the emphasis on getting the code right with XHTML and CSS being used throughout and later sections show how to do as much with CSS positioning as possible to help cut down or remove tables as a way for laying out the pages. Also useful were the notes on the more common browser bugs and how to work around them.

The section on finishing the templates off included how to package them up for release and usefully has notes on licencing and the increasingly popular creative commons method of sharing your work.

There is also a fairly detailed reference to the various classes, styles and tags Joomla! uses with notes on where they are used. I'd have liked to see rather more depth here though as this sort of information can be quite hard to come by without a lot of digging about.

The last few sections cover dynamic menus, Flash, Ajax and incorporating other useful blocks of code and markup via the Wrapper Menu item. Also useful for some will be the notes on how to achieve the Web 2.0 Nirvana of rounded corners on everything. Some final tips on SEO and possible editor problems finishes it off. The appendix is a full listing of the CSS and markup for the example which is also available as a download.

Despite initially rought start, this proved to be a worthwhile book full of useful information that will allow you to create and edit templates with the best of them. Joomla! is a powerful system which has been poorly served by documentation until recently so I was very pleased to see a much needed book to help me get to grips with the Joomla! Template authoring.

Badly written, poorly edited and poor quality printing
I found this to be a big disappointment. Its badly written and poorly edited i.e space wasting repeats of instructions to go to such and such a line and do this followed by another bulleted instruction to go to the same line and do something else when one bulleted paragraph would do, and considering it only runs to 200 pages the space could be better utilized with more instructive copy. The graphics are of very poor quality and are also pointlessly repeated in an oversized space wasting manner. Save your money as you'll find pretty much all this book has to offer free on the web.