Joomla! 1.5 Templates Cookbook

Joomla 1.5 Templates Cookbook is a good beginner's title in the Packt Publishing series of titles on Joomla. One of the biggest frustrations that I often see beginner's have with Joomla is that, although there are many freely available templates for Joomla, few of them are without at least either some minor errors, or stylistic issues that a Web site manager might like to correct. What this book does best is walk the beginner through the process of making minor modifications to templates using a cookbook-based approach with easy-to-follow recipes. The first chapters begin with an overview of Joomla's Template Manager and does a decent job of explaining some of the alternatives to editing templates. However, Carter does not describe the inherent risks in some of those approaches. For example, if you do edit your template's HTML and then reinstall that template, all changes will be lost. Carter also takes a closer look at some of the more specific conventions Joomla! uses to manage site templates, including the use of positions to control module and component layout, the syntax for parameters for providing more advanced options for themes associated with templates, and the role of the XML file in creating an actual template package for distribution. While this information is both accurate and useful, some of it seems a bit out-of-place. For example, the information on the role of the XML file would suggest that Carter also provide some additional detail on how to create a template package. That discussion, relative to other Packt titles on the subject, is extremely light, and I think means that creating a purely custom template is beyond the scope of this title. That said, I would recommend leaving some of this information out of future editions, or would point the reader more directly to other titles that would help with this kind of task (note: the end of the book does reference related Packt titles, but I believe that doesn't go quite far enough.). Chapters three through eight provide recipes for a number of useful revisions to a template, including: * styling the search module * customizing the look of breadcrumbs * adding random background images * working with the administrator templates * adding social bookmarking and integrating Twitter The code for all of these recipes is very clean, and the recipes both useful and relevant. The remaining couple of chapters of the text deal more specifically with integrating components and modules with one's template. In addition to social bookmarking and Twitter, Carter describes how to work with stylesheets for mobile devices, solve problems associated with cross-browser issues, install jQuery, and install Google Analytics. These are all excellent topics, and worthy of inclusion in a book of this scope. If I start, however, with stylesheets for mobile devices, it seems that the book gets a bit off of its cookbook approach. There are some relatively basic things I might do to create stylesheets for mobile devices. I do like that Carter gives some basic recipes for what those solutions might look like. They're very similar to his print stylesheets, and should be relatively easy for the end-user to adapt. Carter then goes on to discuss the MobileJoomla! extension. I've used this extension on my site as recently as a month ago. The author should point out that the latest version (0.9.6 as of this writing) is still in beta--suggesting that it is technically not ready for a production environment. The developers have done an excellent job working a significant number of bugs out of the extension, but it is definitely one I wouldn't recommend. The last item that I looked at in great detail was Carter's advice on installing Google Analytics. In one word: horrible. Templates should describe the look and feel of the pages associated with one's site. That includes font sizes, the color associated with design elements, the placement of logos and of modules. Templates are not, however, an appropriate place for functionality of any sort. Why? I change templates for any reason and that functionality has to get recreated in the new template. It completely defeats the purpose of working with a platform like Joomla! The solution is simple: instead of copying and pasting the code for Google Analytics into one's template, create a custom module, position it, and publish it. The same advice should be followed for any of the other examples Carter provides where he suggests adding custom code to a template. In closing, there's some good information in this title for beginners, but there are definitely some places where some serious revision--and in some cases a different approach--need to be considered in the second edition of this title. In addition, some of the conventions for illustrating code are inconsistent, screen shots use different conventions (arrows that point to specific aspects of a screenshot, for example, are inconsistent; screen shot sizes are arbitrary; screen shots designed to illustrate color are useless in a grey-scale book, and generally irrelevant, regardless). The index is generally solid, though the introductory section on Symbols seems arbitrary and incomplete. Am I still recommending this title? Yes, there are still some great recipes in this title, and the introduction to templating is perfect for a beginner. But I also think there's more potential for this book than the current edition reflects.