Advancing from the basics

Once you start customizing Joomla templates, you are likely to find out sooner or later that the ready-to-go templates of well known templating clubs are actually cluttered with things you don't need. There are lots of fancy parameters that seem to be nice at first, but fill up needless resourceless. Layout files do not comply to Joomla standards. A lot of CSS is unused and refers to common templating instead of your specific site. Actually, customizing these templates might become a burden on the long runn.

When you want to make a living as Joomla templater, another solution is to build your own template from scratch. This requires quite some effort in the beginning, although Bootstrap makes live a lot easier. It allows you to pick the technologies that you prefer and customize things while still being in control of what you customize. It pays off.

A session filled with cool technologies

During the Expert Session of February 6th 2015, we will dive into numerous cool technologies: To improve CSS development, we will show you how your HTML can be standardized with Bootstrap while your CSS can be cleaned up by implementing LESS. LESS compilation can be further optimized by adding Grunt and Gulp scripts to your site, so that your CSS is compiled as soon as your LESS is updated.

We will also show you useful JavaScript snippets, JLayouts and template overrides. After this session, your toolbox will be filled with new things to help you build greater templates.

Enhancing your templating logic

The logic of your Joomla template is based on PHP. With simple PHP tricks you can be more flexible with your template easily. Simple if-else statements help you switch on and off module positions, depending on the current situation. To help you detect a certain situation, having a PHP helper class ready is best practice: This class will serve as a library of shortcuts calls. For instance, if you want to know whether the current homepage - so that you can switch to another page layout - you can simply call upon a isHome() method in that helper.

We will provide you with numerous tips and tricks, plus code samples, that you can implement in your Build Your Own (BYO) template. Interested? Have a space in your agenda at February 6th? Make sure to attend our session in Almere. You can register at the PerfectWebTeam site.