Joomla! 1.5 Template Design Book Review

Packt Publishing kindly asked me to review their latest book about Joomla, titled Joomla! 1.5 Template Design.

Written by Tessa Blakeley Silver and published during June 2009, the book is a complete guide to the design and creation of templates for websites built using the Joomla content management system.

The book has a quite specific target, because the author is addressing only web designers that already know a bit about how Joomla works, and (obviously) know (X)HTML and CSS.

Following the course of the book you'll learn how to build a template from scratch, starting from the general idea, creating the mockup, the design to finally have a great template, standards-compliant, tableless, modern and search engine optimized.

Tessa first introduces her personal design comp method: instead of creating the mockup using Photoshop of Fireworks, we'll create a design demo using HTML and CSS. This way we'll save a ton of time, because when the client approves the design, we'll already have a solid on which we can work, without wasting time adapting the Photoshop psd.

This way we'll also be able to know if it's possibile to create the design we want to make: using Photoshop, you'll never know, you'll only be able to rely on your experience to prevent problems and hours of time wasted.

Once we've done the mockup and the client has approved it, we'll get into the details and we'll integrate the Joomla elements, such as components and modules.

The book explains very clearly how Joomla works to create the presentation, the website look.

After we get the template work correctly, the first phase terminates, and it's time to debug and validate our code. We'll learn how to use powerful tools like Firebug, QorSMode and the IE Developer Toolbar.

Now the template is ready to use, but we can improve it to make it perfect: we can create dynamic layouts, drop-down menus, we can also use Flash to design great interfaces.

Tessa guides us to explore the AJAX interactivity to integrate advanced functionalities, explains the use of template overrides to customize the Joomla output, how to use the Joomla suffixes to design each module and page separately and other great expert tricks.

As the last chapter title says, "good design isn't always visual". A web site must take care of the users first, but also must be search engine friendly, so that our website can increase its users over time.

This is a book to read and always keep near your desk, because it will be really useful as a reference during all your Joomla website life cycle. A must for every Joomla template designer, and for everyone that wants to customize their website theme.