The 5 Building Blocks of Every Joomla Template

Joomla templates are not rocket science. You can learn how to build and modify them. We can show you how. Interested? Read on ...

In order to get started, you'll need to understand the 5 essential building blocks of every Joomla template. In the 5 tutorials below we guide you through them all:

• Part 1: Template setup and templateDetails.xml
• Part 2: Index.php
• Part 3: CSS / Cascading Style Sheets
• Part 4: Images
• Part 5: Security

These tutorials are part of our full Joomla Template Class available to all members. Click here to find out more.

Part 1: Template Setup and templateDetails.xml

Part 2: index.php

Part 3: CSS - Cascading Style Sheets

Part 4: Images

Part 5: Security

We need to make sure that our template is secure and not easily hacked.

There are two essentials steps we need to make that happen:

1. Add this line to the very, very top of index.php. This means that only Joomla can run commands on the file – no outside scripts:

   <?php // no direct access
   defined( '_JEXEC' ) or die( 'Restricted access' );?>

2. Add a blank file called index.html to each folder. That means the main /test/ folder, plus /css/ and /images/. Why? To hide your folder contents. Without an index.html, anyone could see and browse all your files.

These tutorials you've just seen are part of our full Joomla Template Class available to all members. Click here to take your Joomla template skills to the next level.