HowToJoomla! Blog: Community

Last night I had the pleasure of driving up to Dallas with Kyle Ledbetter (@joomlapraise) from JoomlaPraise and his wife, Melinda (@magicmarriages), for the Dallas Joomla Users Group Meetup. We had a great time talking with a group of 50+ Joomla! enthusiasts about one of our favorite topics, Joomla!

Kyle started off the meeting by talking about and demonstrating the new AdminPraise2 (AP2) Joomla administrator template that JoomlaPraise designed and built. Everyone (including me) was really impressed with the features and flexibility that AP2 offered. I look forward to using it on my next project!

Then we spent some time discussing "What makes a good template". I talked about what I viewed as the conventional wisdom of what makes a good template: eye candy, javascript effects, light weight, SEO, standards compliant/accessible, flexible, and easy to use. I then summed it up by saying that what really makes a good template is that it does what you want it to do, looks like you want it to look, and you can afford it.

We finished the meeting with a tutorial on how to build a Joomla! 1.5 template. I discussed the files that make up a template, the Joomla! functions/markup that make up a template index.php file, the contents of the "templateDetails.xml" file, and how all of the various parts of a template work together. I developed a sample Joomla! template for the meeting, which you can download in the downloads area of this site.

At the end of the meeting, we gave away some cool Wrox notebooks that were graciously provided by my publisher, Wrox. We also gave away 3 copies of my Joomla book, Beginning Joomla! Web Site Development, as well as a copy of AdminPraise2 and a 1-year subscription to JoomlaPraise.

The meeting went really well, and we had a great time. Thanks to Wilma Howell (@txgeekette) for organizing the event and being the head organizer for the Dallas Joomla! Users Group.

Downloads

• Presentation Slides
• Sample Template