Joomla! Community Magazine™

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.

Over the years I've been involved in Joomla!, I’ve seen some great improvements in templates. Many templates are now very sophisticated, slick and beautiful. Just compare the early work of any of the veteran template providers with their recent efforts to see the quantum leaps they’ve all made.

Candy for the eyes... occasionally I come across a website that inspires me. The connection between the users and the identity of the website can be astonishing.

Most any site that sees longevity on the internet will at some point need a redesign. Recently, I did this with one of my sites, and now I'd like to share my thoughts and planning going through this process.

This month we interview Stian Didriksen, lead developer of Ninjaboard, the latest Joomla! forum component from Ninjaforge. Ninjaboard is of particular interest here in the Designer's Studio as it has been constructed with design and Joomla! templates in mind.

We live in a world where we have adopted standards in the physical and material world. The software world is no different. Joomla! has also become one of the most popular CMSs in the world and yet it has ways to go before its extensions abide by the standards. But we are hopeful, as a growing number of Joomla! developers have embraced Web standards and we urge the user populace to take notice of this key attribute.

Joomla! 1.6 stable is right around the corner. With it comes an administrator interface that although significantly updated, remains largely the same as the previous interface from Joomla! 1.5. The Joomla! 1.5 admin interface was an updated version of the original Joomla! 1.0 interface, which was inherited from Mambo. One could say that we're using an interface that's been around the better part of this decade. That's an eternity in software.