Joomla! Template Design: Create your own professional-quality templates with this fast, friendly guide

In DetailJoomla! 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.
This well-crafted and easy-to-use book is a complete guide to creating Joomla! templates for your website. It guides you through setting up a basic workflow for Joomla! template design, debugging and validating the template code, creating drop-down menus, interactive forms, and dynamic forms for your site, and packaging up your finished template in a ZIP file for users.
ApproachThis 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 forThis 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.