Build your own Joomla template - creating a blank template

So here we go.

The layout I want to achieve is the one on the previous post and having made the decision to start from scratch I have poked about inside the 3 templates provided with Joomla looking for a common approach and so I can also steal tips from them as and when I need them.

Setting up a new template to work on

There is a very good tutorial on the new wiki http://docs.joomla.org/Tutorial:Creating_a_basic_Joomla!_template. The trouble with this method, although excellent, is I to get everything ready before messing with templates, sometimes it can be quite useful starting with a core template and stripping it down, learning as you go.

Copying templates to play with

Being an impatient fool I wanted faster results so I thought it would be a wicked wheeze to copy an existing template and then customise it. I think this is worthwhile so you can experiment with them without damaging the originals. Little did I know that this path would take longer.

The template I picked was rhuk_milkyway as it looked a lot simpler than beez or ja_purity. I took a copy of the files into another directory and renamed the template, by editing the templateDetails.xml file, zipped the files and ran the install. Big Mistake!

I then spent ages dealing with all the install error messages (File '/Users/xxxxx/Sites/yyyyy/zzzzz/tmp/install_4a82e20665eca/images/mw_box_blue_bl.png' does not exist.) as surprise, surprise not all the files in the templateDetails.xml seemed to be there which was bizarre. So I ended up editing templateDetails.xml and commenting out all the missing files, which took some time. I have found this doc http://docs.joomla.org/Tutorial:Create_a_copy_of_the_MilkyWay_Template But to be honest this indicates that perhaps this template is not a good place to start. If there are harcoded links to files in other files then I suspect that it is probably better to start again.

I have since done the same with JA_purity and Beez and this works pretty well. Strangely I still get warnings about files in the language section of the templateDetails.xml, but these files already exist in the Joomla build so I am not going to worry for now.

At least now I have some test versions of Beez and Ja_purity which I can play with without causing damage.

Generating the template install file

In the Joomla 1.0.x days there was a nice little script from http://www.joomlart.com which would generate the templateDetails.xml file so it was easy to package up your template once it was finished. Searching http://extensions.joomla.org for an updated version can can see lots of nice new standalone tools for modules and templates but sadly they all are for Windows and I can't seem to find one for non windows environments. This means that I will probably have to code templateDetails.xml from scratch which will not be fun but I think I will face that challenge when I get to it.