Joomla Templates

This is a brief walkthrough on how to design a Joomla template without dreamweaver using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). With CSS based templates, its very easy to get make a templates compared to designing with tables.

CSS based pages are really easy to use with CMSs though, and very versatile and more consistant stylistically. A good example of how versatile CSS can make a page, take a look at CSS Zen Garden.

 The first step is to get an idea of what you want your site to look like.  Do you want more than one column for your data? Do you want sidebars?  a big header?  footer? 

All of the basic layouts, compatible with all the major browsers can be found at Dynamic Drive's CSS library. 

These layouts are plain however.  A great place to get CSS ideas from is eConsultant's CSS layouts list.  They give you the CSS files you can start with to model your page and adjust to get exactly the look you want. A couple of my favorites are Layout Gala and MaxDesign which has very strightforward code, plaintext, has nice clean layouts you can use right away.  Some of the sites like Ruthsarian Layouts are great places to learn what CSS can do when its really pushed, but the CSS files can be multilayered and complicated, so make sure you look at the css files behind your layout before you choose.

There are also lists on eConsultant for CSS popup menus, CSS tutorials and ajax tips if you want to go there.

Unfortunately at this time Squidoo does not allow me to actually portray PHP code on its webpages.  This is a real problem to those making lenses on web technologies.  so this is more of a resource page than a how to.

  A good overview on making a table based template can be found on wikibooks.