Compass Designs

A Joomla website has several elements that all work together to produce the web page you see in your browser.   All of the information on the site is stored in a database. The information can be in several forms:

• Content Items– these are the articles of your website
• Components – more complex content such as forums
• Modules – smaller content that usually allow interactivity, like a poll/survey

All of this content is pulled from the database by the CMS and arranged/presented as determined by the site template.The template is simply a set of rules about presentation. For example, the template will determine how many columns to use, or what color to make titles. The template also determines the layout or positioning of the web page.

 

The Least You Need To Know
A Joomla site is made up of information and a template. Information can be in the forms of content items, components or modules. The template acts as a filter or a lens. It is controlling all the presentation aspects of the web pages. It does not have any content, but can include logos.

The page will always have a “Main Body”. This is where the content items, or a component will be presented. Usually modules occurred around the outside of a page. Not all components present content. Some, for example SEF (Search Engine Friendly URL’s) do other things, in this example, change the URL of a page into something more readable.

 

Let’s look at the individual elements of this page:

 

As you can see, in this template, the main body is in the big middle column. Various modules are shown in the two side columns. This is the home page of the site, the main body is actually a component called the Frontpage component. We’ll talk more about that the Frontpage component in a later blog.