Joomla Template Blog

Calling all you Joomla experts! I have just set up my first Joomla site for single people in Liverpool at www.liverpoolsinglesnights.co.uk. I don’t know where to begin on the main page of the site in relation to making it as good a community site as Myspace or Facebook. I mean should I start replacing the logo with my own, or tackle the articles first?

So if anybody can me some good advice on where to start customising the templates (I want a red themed site, logo etc.), I would be eternally grateful.

Cheers
liverpoo

http://www.liverpoolsinglesnights.co.uk

You have a lot to do! You site is nothing but Joomla!
You must replace EVERYTHING…
(And to do that, you have to learn how to program…)

So I am a webdesigner… I primarily do actionscripting with flash. I do play with html too, and am now going to try and start freelancing and am looking to learn how to customize an open source CMS. I really like wordpress, but I feel it’s a bit limiting, and I really like concept of Drupal and Joomla, but feel that perhaps these are a bit overwhelming too. I don’t want to learn a whole new language (php), but I do want to use a CMS. What are your thoughts? Is it ok to customize open source themes for clients? Thanks in advance!

Hi,

It seems as though you already know the main differences, though wordpress can be customised heavily it is basically blog software, we’ve created a knowledgebase ourselves using wordpress though which works well and I’m sure there are many other good uses.

Drupal and Joomla are both great CMS and both have a roughly equal share of the market. You can achieve a lot of the same things between them, but it makes sense to choose one and focus your efforts upon it fully to gain a deep knowledge of it instead of spreading yourself and being average at both.

I would suggest you spend a day or two using both, and decide which you prefer then stick with it. You will be able to develop in either fine, and both are fully skinnable, you should read the license of open source themes but most will be fine to customise yourself even for commercial use.

Regards,

Darryl

Hey there. This is my first time setting up my own Joomla website. Any help is apprieciated!

My Questions are:

- How do you actually buy a Template. I know theres plenty of sites selling them, but how does it work. Can I just do a one off payment and then download the Template to host via FTP?

- How much can you alter a template? Like this for example: http://joomla.siteground.com/index.php?mos_change_template=siteground58

Could I make ‘Easy customization’ and ‘Free themes’ appear in the one column so all the news is visable without it being cut off.
Could I change the Green font and lines to a different color?
Could I add a subnavigation? So when I hover/click something in the top right navigation, there is pages WITHIN those pages. So if you had multimedia, you could have Music and Videos as pages within.

Sorry for all the ‘could i’, but basically I want to know how much I can alter and customise the templates.

- Thanks, any other useful bits of information are welcome

You can alter VERY much of the joomla template. The best way to learn how to do all this is to get a PAID membership at either one of these 2 template sites – www.joomlart.com or www.rockettheme.com

Both these sites have a VERY VERY live and strong userbase. The community there will be happy to help do simple things like changing the logo, colors, or re-sizing and adding boxes and stuff. Don’t bother with the free stuff. Stick to either one of those 2 sites and get tons of free help from the forums. That’s the best place for a joomla newb to start.

I tried playing around with Joomla not long ago, and although I could manage a couple of things, I could never get past removing the "Joomla" sign, thus not being able to make it appear like my own site.

I was always able to get shallow advice like "switch themes," which was pretty unhelpful.

Please don’t tell me to go to that Joomla support site that’s on the Joomla page. It’s pretty bad, as well. I don’t want something where I’ll feel lucky if I get an answer. I need the real, best way to learn it and best way to get my problems handled, if possible.

Is there a Joomla for dummies?

Where, please – thanks!
None of the advice I got about removing the Joomla sign was the least bit helpful.

I tried to get into Joomla myself and I agree that the online documentation is pretty useless. The guide I downloaded had entirely blank sections waiting to be updated by the community. So I gave up.

I always recommend buying a book if at all possible when it comes to learning a complicated piece of software or programming. It’s all there without endless searching on the web. Luckily, there are quite a few books on Joomla available at Amazon.