Joomla! Community Magazine™

Many years ago, when I first started designing Joomla! websites, I found that I ran into a few stumbling blocks when working with clients. Being young and eager, I'd always jump straight into a design with very little thought, preparation, or even communication with a client! I would spend hours and hours at my desk coming up with what I thought was the "perfect design" for the client only to get it completely rejected with comments such as, "I was thinking of something a little different", or "That's not quite what I had in mind", or even worse "Are you really a designer?"

As I stand here, staring down the corridor of endless possibilities for interfaces and user experiences, I must report that I can see the future and it looks good. Joomla’s administrator template system has come quite a long way.

Yesterday I broke one of my rules when it comes to template development - I started to cross browser test before I validated.

I had my design looking perfect in Safari and Firefox and, without thinking, thought I would see what it looked like in Internet Explorer. As most of you have probably experienced waiting for the page to load in Internet Explorer 6 or 7 on a design for the first time can be a somewhat nerve wracking experience.

Since the release of Joomla! 1.6, Joomla! providers have received a number of requests on Joomla! 1.6 Free Templates from Joomla! users. In this article, I would like to introduce some Joomla! 1.6 free templates on several themes from different Joomla! experts. By choosing templates based on certain themes, I hope to meet your first requests on building websites with Joomla!

At the end of April Rocket Theme announced the arrival of their long awaited and much anticipated admin theme for Joomla! 1.5 and Joomla! 1.6. Rocket Theme club members have had access to the beta version during the development process and I'm sure to the delight of many a Joomla! user, when the theme was ready for release it was made freely available for all Joomla! users to download.

One of the things that tends to grab my attention browsing sites is the creative use of dates. It's not always appropriate, or even necessary, to get creative with date styling and in most cases, it is only relevant for blogs and perhaps even then, blogs written by creative people. But nonetheless, I love it when a designer puts an elegant or flamboyant touch into the design of their date elements.

Being given the challenge of styling or restyling a Joomla! site can quickly mean that the erstwhile designer has to don a virtual trenchcoat and fedora to miraculously transform into a code detective. One of the most confusing things for new Joomla! users when it comes to changing a design element on a Joomla! website is trying to figure out where the code for any given style is coming from, and then of course it's another thing to then go and change the style.

Someone must have said something bad about Joomla! template clubs last month, because they certainly stepped it up a notch in February.

A few weeks ago Kyle and I set about the task of choosing our top 5 templates for 2010. To say it was a difficult task is an understatement.

Over the past few months, Kyle and I have been compiling a killer list of Joomla! templating snippets that has the potential to change the way that you approach templating in Joomla!.

We had planned to publish this article well before the release of Joomla! 1.6, and to release the 1.6 version of this post to coincide with it going stable ... but alas, that is not to be. Given that the Joomla! 1.5 end life is still a long way off, I'm pretty sure you will find this list useful for your upcoming projects.