Joomla! 1.5 Template Design

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.

Chapter 1 introduces you to the Joomla! 1.5 CMS, letting you know what you'll need to be aware of regarding the Joomla! 1.5 template project you're ready to embark on. The chapter also covers the development tools that are recommended and web skills that you'll need to begin developing a Joomla! 1.5 template for the most popular, robust, Open Source, content management system available for the Web today! Chapter 2 covers the key elements of a Joomla! template and what considerations to make while working with your mock up. You will learn some basic techniques for image extraction and optimization, and some tips and tricks to enhance your design workflow and speed up the design revision process. In Chapter 3, you will learn how to set up your development environment and an HTML editor for a smooth work flow. You will also learn how to make your template truly table-less by implementing template overrides. Chapter 4 will help you understand the basic wash rinse repeat process of debugging and validating your template's code. You will learn how to use the W3C's XHTML and CSS validation tools and further explore the value of using Firefox as a development tool using its JavaScript Console and Firebug extension. In Chapter 5, you will learn about the templateDetails.xml file and what each part of that file does in detail. Also, you will learn how to package up your finished template into a working ZIP file that anyone should be able to upload into their own Joomla! installation. Chapter 6 covers key reference information under easy-to-look-up headings that will help you with your Joomla! template development. From the many CSS ID and class styles that Joomla! itself outputs to Joomla!'s jdoc tags and their controlling attributes, information in this chapter is listed along with key links to bookmark to make your template development as easy as possible. In Chapter 7, you will learn to make your layout dynamic so it can handle collapsible columns. You'll then learn to add drop-down menus to your Joomla! template and we discuss various ways to display Flash content. In Chapter 8, we will take look at the most popular methods to get you going with AJAX in Joomla! and help you create interactive and dynamic forms in your Joomla! site. Also, you will see some cool JavaScript toolkits and libraries you can use to make your site appear "Ajaxy". This chapter will also help you learn how to download and install Joomla! Extensions for your Joomla! site. Chapter 9 covers how to enhance your template by adding a params.ini file so that your template's users have more dynamic control over your template's configuration right from the administration panel. For you PHP gurus out there, the basics you need to know about editing module chrome and template override files is covered. Last, you will pick up some key tips for easily implementing today's coolest CSS tricks into your template.