The Beez-Knees of Joomla 1.5
The Beez-Knees of Joomla 1.5
Written by craig coffman
If you develop in Joomla, you no doubt are aware of how important and relatively easy it is to create a template. However, once you have pain-stakeingly crafted a glorious xhtml/css layout, you get it trampled on be the code from the beloved CMS. Or at least you used to.
Joomla 1.5 has introduced an interesting addition to the template. It is the html folder. That’s right. There exists in the 1.5 templates a folder which allows you to overwrite the code Joomla spits out. Entirely. This is huge and I am wondering why it took so long to achieve this.
The bigger issue is that you now can have a tableless Joomla site. Fantastic. While you could go through the bother of creating your own html folder and writing your own scripts to replace all the table tags with div tags and other modern code, you do not have to. Enter the Beez: Joomla Accessible Template.
Included in the default Joomla 1.5 install is the Beez template, already primed and rearing to go with tableless markup. This makes it the ideal starting point for creating your own template. Just monkey around with the index.php file as you normally would and there you go. Want something better? Greedy, are we?
Fine. Something to satiate your rabid development needs then. Suppose you already have a template and think it would suck to copy and paste over the top of the Beez template. Well, aside from it really not being hard to do, you do not even need to bother. Simply drag the html folder into your template and you are done! Viola. Semantically proper code within your Joomla site.
Okay, I need to point out that Beez does not account for every 3rd party bit you may have installed. For those, you will need to create your own layout. However, you can control the output for components, modules and plugins. Everything can be clean and beautiful. Beez tackled the main bits of Joomla and many components and a few modules, so you are largely on your way.
Still not wanting to use this immediately? Well, here is the biggest bonus I can think of. It is future-proof. What? Yup. When you update Joomla to the next 1.5 version, you do not have to worry about saving out the bits you hacked in the core files, finding where they exist in the updated files, and then hoping it does not break . The reason for this is the html folder is an override to the Joomla core output. It still puts out the same code, regardless of the Joomla version! Brilliant! Unless the Joomla team re-writes how the system puts out the information, you will never have to touch those files in the html folder again.
Here is another thing, although you might have guessed it. The code is portable to other Joomla templates. Any site you make, you drop this folder in and you are done. Install a new component which you then tweak? Drop that folder into any previous template and now you can install the component there as well with no need for further code manipulation.
Again, this is only for those using Joomla 1.5 and up. If you are not, then this will not help except to spur you into adopting the newer version. Even without the complete support of all the 1.0 extensions, The ability to completely handle code output without those annoying and difficult core file hacks is worth it to me. Hopefully this will help you out too.