How Do I Use My Own Page Design Im Joomla?

23. Feb, 2010 1 Comment

I just discovered Joomla web design software but feel highly limited by the 3 templates available. The software is awesome.

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One Response to “How Do I Use My Own Page Design Im Joomla?”

  1. jimiales 23. Feb, 2010 at 3:18 am

    I completely agree with the awesomeness of Joomla! You will not believe how easy it is to customize it. First off, there are thousands of free Joomla! templates. I like to go find a free template that offers the general layout that I am looking for then customize the images. After that, you got a website that can be managed by anyone experienced enough to ask a question in this forum.
    I have a decent amount of programming experience, but upon opening Joomla! my first time, I was like, “OK, content management system, huh? Alright, where’s the website?” Once I knew that I could display modules anywhere on the page, and I can put any content that I want in an article, I was lovin’ life.
    Look at the index.php in the rhuk_milkyway template folder. The first twelve lines or so are PHP comments to the developer(you). Next you see… ” defined( ‘_JEXEC’ ) or die( ‘Restricted access’ ); ” We are now connected to Joomla! Then you see a number of lines linking CSS style sheets. Those files are what you need to edit to make changes to the appearance of the template. They reside in root/templates/rhuk_milkyway/css.
    This brings me to a seemingly never-ending obstacle when learning Joomla! What the heck is a module position? Well, eventually, in your index.php, you will come to… . In a nutshell, that is the line of code that displays all of the modules in the position named “top”. So creating a new module position is as simple as . Then type “new_position” into the position field for the module in the module manager.
    You can put these jdoc’s anywhere you want. Example…





    Some other things to know…
    You can only display one component on a page.
    To further change the design, use class suffixes.
    I use Firefox and an add-on toolbar called Web Developer that is freely available to check the names of classes and

    ‘s. With this method, you can see exactly which class to edit or add to gain complete layout control.
    With the info above and the knowledge that an article and a module can contain any content the sky is the limit.