Compass Designs .net

A couple of weeks ago, I completed the manuscript of Joomla 1.5: A User's Guide to Building a Joomla! Powered Website and had sent it to the publishers!

I asked subscribers to the Joomla 1.5 Book News what chapter they would like to see available as a sample. After a short poll, the winner was clear:

Creating Pure CSS Joomla 1.5 Template Tutorial

In this chapter, we'll go through the steps of creating a Joomla 1.5 template. Specifically, we will create a template that uses CSS to produce a layout without use of tables. This is a desirable goal because it means that the template code is easier to validate to World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards. It will also tend to load faster, be easier to maintain, and perform better in search engines. These issues are discussed in detail later in the chapter.

As part of my continuing effort to give back to the community, I have released this template guide here at Compass under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 2.5 License. This is the same one used on the help site at Joomla.org. This means you can make any non-commercial use you'd like to, and are free to adapt (or remix) the work. All you need to do is keep the attributation (link). I'll soon have a handy HTML file that you can use to host the content on your own site.

I had hoped to have this sample chapter available sooner so everyone participating in the Joomla 1.5 Template Competition could make use of it, but there are still a few days left!

PDF version of the template guide now available for download