Joomla!® For Dummies®

Chapter 9. Laying Out Your Web Pages with Joomla Templates

In This Chapter

• Understanding templates

• Using Template Manager

• Setting a new default template

• Customizing the built-in templates

• Getting new Joomla templates

This chapter is all about the layout of your Web site. You can set the layout with menu items, of course, but even more essential are templates: those collections of PHP and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) files that determine the real layout of your Web pages in Joomla.

Templates determine what goes where in Joomla, so they're exceptionally important. Although Joomla itself comes with only a few built-in templates, you can download your own, as you see in this chapter.

Formatting Joomla Sites with Templates

Joomla has built-in HTML editors that allow you to format articles the way you want them, but it has no officially sanctioned editor that allows you to create your own templates. The way your individual pages are laid out — their very look and feel — is totally dependent on the template you use.

What's more, Joomla doesn't have a built-in template editor that allows you to drag components and modules where you want them in a page and design their appearance. As we show you in this chapter, you can edit some template parameters in Template Manager, but you can't make fundamental changes unless you get into the PHP and the CSS files.

Tip

Various third-party template editors are available for Joomla, and they're a good start. But we've found the ones we've worked to be unsatisfactory ...