Joomla! How-To's: Templates

This post is for all of you Mac fans out there, specifically those using the excellent Coda editor by Panic. I could preach all day long about how using a quality code editor like Coda can both speed up your coding as well as make your coding better.

One brilliant little function of Coda is that it has a built-in code snippet collector called 'Clips'. What's even more brilliant is that Coda gives developers a way to share groups of these clips with each other. I was inspired by our friend Jon from Zuno Studios when he released a few clip groups relating to Joomla 1.5 development a few months ago. His clips are specifically geared towards developers creating extensions, and if you're at that level I highly recommend checking out his handy clips.

Since more of my day-to-day work involves creating templates, I put together a set of clips that I use almost daily for creating Joomla 1.5 templates. Lucky for you Coda users out there, I've packaged them up in a tidy group that you can download.

Today, the self-proclaimed "Fastest Joomla! Admin Template" was released to the public. What makes this especially exciting, is that it was released for free! The team at JoomlaPraise developed a 'lite' version of their ground-breaking AdminPraise2 Joomla! administrator template, called (you guessed it) AdminPraise Lite.

As promised, here is an article about one of the things I learned while upgrading How To Joomla to Joomla! 1.5. I have been using JomComment on How To Joomla for quite a while. You may have noticed that besides having the usual "Add Comment (2)" link at the end of each article introduction, I have also added a comment counter and link along with the "Written by...," date, section, and category, as shown in this image:

With the ability to override Joomla!'s core content output in a Joomla! 1.5 template, you can do virtually anything within your template. This tutorial demonstrates how to use template overrides to insert a JomComment comment counter anywhere you want to add it in your articles.

One of the greatest things about Joomla! is the ability to customize anything you want. It even enables you to change the template that you use for the administrator back end of your site, just as easily as you can change the template for the front end of your site. The default template for the Joomla! 1.5 administrator is the culmination of countless hours of design work by Andy Miller, and it provides a great interface for managing your site. However, the brilliant minds behind Joomla! recognized that there would be possible reasons for modifying the look of the administrator interface, so they used the same template system for the back end as they use for the front end. Read on to see how to change the administrator template.

In October 2006, I wrote a how-to for displaying your page title within your Joomla! 1.0 template. Since the release of Joomla! 1.5, I have gotten many requests for an article explaining how to do this in Joomla! 1.5. Here is how you do it...