Joomla! Community Magazine™

In this third episode of the series about templates and frameworks for Joomla, Emmanuel Lemor shows us three popular frameworks: Sparky, Astroid and T4.

When it comes to building your website in Joomla 5.x, you have a few options as mentioned in Episode I, you could use the built-in template of Cassiopeia, custom fields, tags etc and opt for the great built-in option: Joomla's Built-in Content Templates Page Builder, as presented in the article by Brian Teeman or like so many of us, you could opt for one of the Template Frameworks and possibly Visual Page Builders that exist… (for a reminder on those, check out May’s Episode I where I set the groundwork for this series).

Do you have pages with a lot of content, or do you want to create a page where the visitor can decide for themselves which info they’d like to see (like an FAQ page)? An accordion is perfect for that. The visitor gets an overview of the topics, clicks on the interesting ones and the content gets revealed. And the good part is: you don’t need an extension for this, you can do it with a little tweaking - creating an override - of one of Joomla’s core views. Here’s how you do it!

In less than 4 months, Joomla will turn 19 - and boy has it evolved into a truly powerful, very capable, yet easy to use solid and accessible young adult (and platform). Thanks to not just its vibrant community of promoters, testers, developers, documenters, marketers and helpers but also our component, module, and plugin builders that are all around - and a very appreciated part of the Joomla project. 

"Joomla is complicated", "Joomla is for tech guys", "Joomla isn't user friendly". These are just a few of the most common (unfair) critics - or rather: assumptions - I've read about this awesome CMS.

In fact, Joomla is exactly like any other CMS or topic: cooking, astrophysic, woodcraft, scuba diving, etc. It's complicated if you don't take time to learn and to train about a minimum.

In the last article of this series (Cassiopeia, Joomla’s powerful built-in template: how to use css classes for your category blog) we talked about css classes for the category blog. Now we want to explore the possibilities for styling and positioning images inside an article.

When you start creating your website, you may want to search for a template that fits the design you have in mind. Instead of looking at extensive templates, page builders or frameworks with endless possibilities, you could also try Joomla’s core template, Cassiopeia. It looks simple, but it’s so powerful once you know how to use it. In this article, we cover the basic settings and options of Joomla’s built-in powerhouse.

Remember last month’s challenge to propose a design for our ‘own’ Joomla website? The challenge idea was born out of the marketing team's desire to bring a more harmonious look and feel to Joomla's websites. And to bring us into this decade, as the core sites were all made in the 2010’s and to take the different looks and feel and coordinate across the brand.

Let’s dive in to see who had a say and what their contribution was. 

Fancier, more stylish, super hip, or just different: sometimes you just want your website to look a little less standard. In this new series, we show you how to do that with simple adjustments, step by step.

Template overrides are, for me, the most powerful feature of Joomla. I use them a lot and they are what makes the difference between a good looking website and a great one. They can be as simple as moving the intro image above the article title to something more complex, including CSS and JavaScript changes, such as creating a photo gallery from a category of articles or creating a set of buttons to filter the content.