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Joomla 1.5 Template Beta Testing

Joomla! 1.5 TemplateI’ve been building web sites of one kind or another since around 1995. These days I do it mostly for fun and very occasionally for profit.

For the past year or so, I have been using an Open Source Content Management System (CMS) called Joomla! (or J! in my shorthand notation) to manage my personal web site. The price is right ($0.00) and it has most of the functionality that I need either out-of-the-box or by adding one or more of the many available third-party extensions.

The Joomla! Project released a beta of their latest software (J! 1.5) on 12 October 2006.  J! 1.5’s outward appearance is not much different than its predecessor (J! 1.0.x), but its internals have undergone radical changes.  And one of those changes was in the way templates are developed.  

J!’s notion of templates is a bit different than the norm.  Most systems define templates as the underlying mechanism that produces the theme, or layout, seen on the user’s screen.  In J!’s case, the term template is used interchangeably to describe both the layout and the logic that produces it.

Now to the point…I’ve been doing some testing of the new J! templating approach and figured as long as I was going to keep some notes about it, I might as well share it with you.  OK…if you look at right side panel, under the Local Stuff menu, the you will see a link to a page called Joomla! 1.5 Template Stuff.  That page and the child pages listed below it contain some stuff I learned about building templates for J! 1.5.

14 thoughts on “Joomla 1.5 Template Beta Testing”

  1. HarryB –

    This is *SWEET*.

    First of all, I think any decent attorney should be able to use what you have in Disclaimers section to guard against attack.

    The index.php page is EXACTLY what is missing right now. And, the way you have it laid out with “old way” and “new way” makes it a snap to figure out what we need to do. (The target audience being a) people who have made templates in v 1.0.x or Mambo and b) people who are not trying to figure out the new template parameter fancy pants stuff.)

    I saw that Johan posted a “part 1” of the template changes blog entry last night. ( http://dev.joomla.org/component/option,com_jd-wp/Itemid,33/p,210/ ) IMO, that would be an excellent place for you to offer this documentation to the community.

    I personally thank you, Harry, and am glad I waited until *YOU* did the heavy lifting to go back to my v. 1.5 templates and make adjustments. šŸ˜‰

    Good work. (The Pugilist? The Plunder from Down Under? Harry – I am not certain I will have time to visit your site anymore. There is too much good stuff here! I wanted the Kangaroo to win, though.)

  2. @Amy

    As you suggested, I left a comment on Johan’s blog earlier this evening. And also did some cleanup of typos and a few other nits…

  5. Did some cleanup and rewriting today, and also added a section on the default CSS classes used by Joomla!.

    My work here is done for a while. Probably won’t be any updates or new stuff for a while. Dan Briggs called, so I have other work to do for a while…and my back yard is full of fallen leaves that need to be disposed of.

  6. Thanks for the CSS classes, too. This is very helpful and I think even doable for migration. I’m going to convert the one for my project at work, today. We are not in a huge hurry (thankfully – for once) since I want them to wait a bit until v 1.5 is stable. I did not want to jump on the 1.0.x bandwagon with the new, refactored code so close. OK. You can have the day off to rack and chase bunnies.

  9. Made some updates to Section II, index.php, to correct typos and provide additional information regaarding conditional testing and variables.

  11. Wow. You really did take it down! Hm. šŸ™ One thing I liked about your documentation, Harry, is that it was very to the point with the specific JDoc: examples rather than an entire guide. I think both forms of documentation are complementary. But, that is okay, too! šŸ™‚

    OK, but, I have a question for you about the $option parameter.

    In this post, Johan indicates the “$option, $mainframe, $Itemid are also accessible if needed.” Do those still work, or, are did they get removed after this post?

    http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,101825.msg535479.html#msg535479

    Thanks! me

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