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.