Today I want tell you something about the 2nd Joomla Book from the publisher Packt Publishing -  "Joomla! Template Design".

The author Tessa Blakeley Silver show on over 200 pages all points of the template design for the free CMS Joomla.

Click here for the full review

The first 3 chapters describes the basiscs of webdesign like CSS, XHTML, colordesign and effecktive working at the example of the Joomla standard template "Rhuk solarflare II". You will work in the workspace of Dreamwaver and Firefox.

After learning the basics you will create your first own template. It´s important for the author that all mordern webtechnologies are in the correct syntax which is checked by tools of the W3C foundation.

With screenshots you see the differences on the frontpage if you change parameters in the backend of Joomla. In the next chapter Tesse Silver talks about the work with dynamic menus and interactive elements like Flash and AJAX. In my opinion she talks to less about AJAX- only the possibility of this technology and the include via the wrapper component.

Last but not least you find a short reference about all used CSS styles in in the of the book. That´s very practical and saves a lot of work! 

You will learn:

• set up basic workflow for template design
• Debug and validation of your code
• using of validation tools
• packaging of your template
• using of flash und dynamic forms
• using the wrapper und install Joomla! Extensions 

The book isn´t the right choice for beginners whose don´t know the meaning of the words CSS or Joomla. But if you want to design your own template and not use everytime standardtemplates the is the right recommandation for you.

 
Result: recommendable

Difficulty: easy- medium (CSS knowledge is needing!)

Title: Joomla! Template Design
Author: Tessa Blakeley Silver
Publisher: Packt Publishing
Pages: 232
Price: 45 $
language: englisch
ISBN: 1847191444