Joomla – An Essential Introduction 

Joomla is one of the latest and most powerful web design programs available in the market today. It is also one of the most user friendly programs you can find, allowing you to be as creative and as playful as you want. Joomla is an alternative to the already existing software and programs dominating the market for a long time. The main characteristic of Joomla is the different philosophy and mentality behind it, which makes it stand out from anything else you knew so far. 

Joomla-Designing

If you are designing for the Joomla! CMS for the first time, you will need to understand that designing a template for a Content Management System such as Joomla! is quite different from designing a web page. You may be comfortable with creating a design layout in Photoshop or your favorite graphic editor and then using your editor's export feature to generate the image slices and HTML markup required to render the web page. Likewise, you may be more comfortable working with a WYSIWYG editor such as Dreamweaver so that you can clearly see your page layout as you create the CSS and format content for it. 

Joomla is different. It holds all the content within several MySQL database tables. What you'll be designing is the shell, which will eventually hold content when it is called from the database by a web user selecting a link on the site. At the same time, the layout and CSS you create for the template will be automatically applied across many pages (perhaps thousands) depending on how big the site is. This can be quite liberating and overwhelming, or frustrating at the same time. 

Joomla Characteristics

The first thing you'll notice is that it will be difficult to review your Joomla template's layout at a glance from within your local WYSIWYG editor. If you're used to working with a WYSIWYG editor to create Cascading Style Sheets for your layout, you'll notice that Joomla generates many id and class names on-the-fly, which make it difficult (though not impossible!) to use your editor's CSS Wizard to create style sheets for Joomla!. In this book, I've taken steps where possible to let you see where it's beneficial to use your favorite graphic and WYSIWYG editors, and where it's better to "peek under the hood", and look directly at the CSS and XHTML markup you will be creating for a website and web page.

In a nutshell, your Joomla template design is not the website. Joomla has been designed to have many different templates installed so that you can quickly and easily switch between them. You can even have certain pages that call specific templates while the rest of the site calls a main template. It might be better to consider your template design as one of the many features that can be installed into the Joomla CMS. In fact, while working on it you'll notice that installing a final template package into Joomla is almost identical to installing a module or component extension into Joomla, which is quite helpful to any first time designer.