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Part 3

Using Joomla

Chapter 8: The Front End

Let’s now take a look at the site that has been created. I will refer to these pages as the front end. Joomla sites are displayed using a file called a template. A lot of beginners end up using one of the templates supplied with Joomla. You could also install one of the hundreds of templates available from professional developers or have a unique template designed for you. You will learn more about templates in Chapter 15.

There are two aspects of a template to consider. Firstly there is the actual design which includes elements such as the logo, the colors, the fonts, number of columns and so forth. These are primarily controlled by the template file and something more advanced developers would be familiar with; cascading style sheets.

The second aspect to a template is positions. Think of a template as a bunch of boxes. Each piece of content needs to be placed inside a box. Joomla calls these boxes, “positions”. These positions are determined by the template designer and therefore vary from one template to another. When a particular page is requested, Joomla sticks all these boxes together to form a complete page.

Every piece of content that appears on a page has been assigned to a position. I will show you how to view the positions available in the template lesson. For now though I will overlay some boxes on the default Joomla template to give you an idea how this particular template is constructed.