A complete guide for web designers to all aspects of designing unique website templates for the free Joomla! 1.0.8 PHP Content Management System Create Joomla! Templates for your sitesDebug, validate, and package your templates Tips for tweaking existing templates In Detail Joomla! is a free, award-winning content management system written in PHP that allows users to easily publish their content on the World Wide Web and intranets. It is used all over the world for everything from simple websites to complex corporate applications. Joomla! is easy to install, simple to manage, and reliable. The Joomla! template is a series of files within the Joomla! CMS that control the presentation of the content. The template is the basic foundation design for viewing your Joomla! website. To produce the effect of a complete website, the template works hand in hand with the content stored in the Joomla! databases. This book will help you build templates for your Joomla! site. It will help you understand the options in dealing with them. It will help you learn about how to use multiple templates in the same site. It will advise you on creating beautiful Joomla! designs, and using CSS rather than tables in your templates. The book guides you on using animations and other effects in Joomla! templates and provides you with tricks for tweaking existing templates. What you will learn from this book? Set up a basic workflow for Joomla! template designWork on layouts for your templateDebug and validate your template codeUse the W3Cs XHTML and CSS validation toolsPackage up your finished template into a working ZIP fileKnow the standard XHTML markup and CSS classes for Joomla!Create Suckerfish drop-down menusGet Flash content quickly into your Joomla! siteCreate interactive and dynamic forms in your Joomla! siteDownload and install Joomla! Extensions for your Joomla! siteUse the wrapper (Wrapper Menu Item) for fully working Ajax applications Approach This book covers the how-tos of creating templates for Joomla. There is also advice about what works and what to consider when working with your Joomla! template. Who this book is written for? This book is aimed at web designers who want to create their own unique templates for Joomla!. Readers should have basic knowledge of Joomla! (which can be obtained by working through Building Websites with Joomla! ) and also some knowledge of CSS and HTML, and using Dreamweaver for coding purposes.