Angie Radtke - Joomla! Templates

Angie Radtke

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Radtke, Angie.
Joomla! templates / Angie Radtke.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-321-82731-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Joomla! (Computer file) 2. Web sitesAuthoring programs. 3. Web site
development. I. Title.
TK5105.8883.R32 2013
006.7'8dc23 2012017878

Copyright 2013 Pearson Education, Inc.

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. This publication is protected by copyright, and permission must be obtained from the publisher prior to any prohibited reproduction, storage in a retrieval system, or transmission in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or likewise. To obtain permission to use material from this work, please submit a written request to Pearson Education, Inc., Permissions Department, One Lake Street, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey 07458, or you may fax your request to (201) 236-3290.

ISBN-13: 978-0-321-82731-9
ISBN-10: 0-321-82731-7

Text printed in the United States on recycled paper at RR Donnelley in Crawfordsville, Indiana.
First printing, July 2012

Editor-in-Chief
Mark L. Taub

Executive Editor
Debra Williams Cauley

Development Editor
Songlin Qiu

Managing Editor
John Fuller

Project Editor
Elizabeth Ryan

Packager
Kim Arney

Copy Editor
Carol Lallier

Indexer
Richard Evans

Proofreader
Diane Freed

Technical Reviewer
Andrea Tarr

Editorial Assistant
Kim Boedigheimer

Compositor
Kim Arney

Since Joomla! launched in September 2005, it has grown to become one of the most popular content management systems in the world. As this book goes to press in July 2012, Joomla! has been downloaded over 32,000,000 times and provides support for 64 different languages. Joomla! has received multiple awards, and estimates indicate that approximately 2.8% of all Internet Web sites are using Joomla!.

The key to Joomla!s success has always been the help and contributions freely given by a large and diverse group of volunteers from all over the world. The Joomla! project isnt backed by venture capital firms, and it isnt led by a single individual or corporation. It is volunteers who write the code and then test it, translate it, document it, support it, extend it, promote it, and share it.

Volunteers are also continually planning and organizing events all over the world where people come together to learn, connect, and share about Joomla!. These events include hundreds of local user groups, as well as national and international conferences. The first Joomla! World Conference will take place in November 2012 in San Jose, California (go to http://conference.joomla.org for more information).

Work is underway on many improvements and new ideas aimed at keeping Joomla! on a path of continued growth and innovation. Our community is open to all. If the idea of working alongside a diverse group of bright and passionate volunteers from all over the world who are helping to make Joomla! better sounds fun and rewarding to you, then I invite you to join us. To learn more, please go to http://www.joomla.org.

Best regards,

Paul Orwig
President, Open Source Matters

Open Source Matters is the nonprofit organization that provides legal, financial, and organizational support for the Joomla! project.

Joomla! is one of the best known Open Source content management systems with many hundreds of thousands of applications in the most varied areas of use. It offers the best possible conditions for implementing a comprehensive and accessible Web presence. Thousands of extensions for almost any purpose are freely available. The developer and user community is huge. On the Internet you can find many different platforms for exchanging information with other users and developers. Thats an advantage you should not underestimate! But a Web site without individual design is inconceivable. After all, its not just the content that makes a Web site truly unique; above all, its the individual design. This design is the job of the Joomla! templates. In addition to the design aspect, they are also responsible for structuring the content. They create the framework and are basically a template for the content. So they control not only what something looks like but also where the content is located within the document. Joomla! template designers are responsible not only for the design but also for the architecture of the information. When designing a Web site, you need to take into account all requirements of the client as well as the expectations of the visitors.

A small, but important part of these requirements is accessibility. With Joomla!, its really easy to create accessible Web pages.

To develop Joomla! templates, you need some knowledge of different areas of Web technology, much of which has little to do with Joomla! itself. In our time of increasingly manifold technical possibilities, it is difficult to be an expert in all available Web technologies, so we tend to specialize in certain areas. For instance, you have the front-end developer who knows all there is to know about HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), the designer who can use Photoshop with all its functions, the PHP specialist, and the JavaScript expert. To develop Joomla! templates, you need some of all this specialized knowledge.

This book does not replace a specialized reference work on usability, CSS design, information architecture, PHP, JavaScript, accessibility, or HTML5, but it discusses certain aspects of these topics and others. The aim of this book is to give you the required basic knowledge you need to develop Joomla! templates.

I offer you a readily comprehensible guide that makes it easier for Web designers and programmers to develop their own Joomla! template by working through practical examples. All topics mentioned in this book are condensed to their essence, which was particularly hard to achieve because I could easily have written whole books on each topic. I hope I succeeded and that you find my book helpful.