Tutorial: How to understand Joomla templates in five easy steps

In order to get started, you'll need to understand the five essential building blocks of every Joomla template. In the five tutorials below we guide you through them all:

• Part 1: Template setup and templateDetails.xml
• Part 2: Index.php
• Part 3: CSS / Cascading Style Sheets
• Part 4: Images
• Part 5: Security

These tutorials are part of our full Joomla Template Class available to all members. Click here to find out more.

Part 1: Template Setup and templateDetails.xml

Part 1: Session Notes

Copy and Paste:

<install version="1.5" type="template"> test <version>Alpha</version> <creationdate>10/16/09</creationdate> <author>My Name</author> </install>

Part 2: index.php

Part 2: Session Notes

Copy and Paste:

Part 3: CSS - Cascading Style Sheets

Part 3: Session Notes

 body { background: #EF1789; color: #EFE717; } a { color: #333; text-decoration: underline; } img { border: 0px; } 

Part 3: CSS Tutorial Links

• http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp
• http://css.maxdesign.com.au/

Part 4: Images

Part 4: Session Notes

bg.png
(Right Click - Save As - then save to your images directory for your template)

Code

 body { background: url('/../images/bg.png') repeat; }

Part 5: Security

We need to make sure that your template is secure and not easily hacked.

There are two essentials steps we need to make that happen:

1. Add this line to the very, very top of index.php. This means that only Joomla can run commands on the file – no outside scripts:

2. Add a blank file called index.html to each folder. That means the main /test/ folder, plus /css/ and /images/. Why? To hide your folder contents. Without an index.html, anyone could see and browse all your files.

These tutorials you've just seen are part of our full Joomla Template Class available to all members. Click here to take your Joomla template skills to the next level.