Joomla Templates - build or buy (or use a free one)?

There are a gazillion Joomla templates out there and they are all pretty excellent, even the templates you buy are usually of very high standard.

The question is whether to use one of these or build your own.

From my own subjective view these templates are very sophisticated but they are often "very Joomla" in their layout. There is no question that if you find one that suits your needs then even if it is not free it is fantastic value for money. It may also be that if the Joomla user has no real design skills then you can achieve a phenomenal look and feel for the website with no effort. The issue of whether to build your own or use a pre-made one is therefore always around the specifics of your requirement and if you haven't got the skills finding someone to do it for you. For me there are two key issues.

Module Positions

The real issue I personally have with pre-made templates is the rather limited functionality the template builder has to work with, this is not the template builders' fault or in fact Joomla's but the simple fact that the temlpate has to be built using a known set of positions that can be depended on in a standard Joomla installation.

To explain this further the standard templates that come with a Joomla implementation have the common positions of breadcrumb, left, right, top, user1, user2, user3, user4, footer, debug, syndicate. When you load Joomla initially the modules that are enabled are placed in those positions so everything works straight away. I could be wrong (my memory of 1.0 is a bit hazy now) but it is a great improvement in 1.5 that the positions are now set in the template rather than in the Joomla admin interface, but the template builder is still limited to use those positions in order for a template to be successfuly applied to a default Joomla install. You therefore end up with a Joomla install which only really uses these positions (and perhaps a few more).

In my case I have a very different need for a home page so I am not sure these default positions will work for me.

Front page layout

The front page component is excellent for featuring content on the front page, but I find it a bit limiting in layout. You tend to end up with a single list of articles which can have some versatility in having 2 columns or perhaps some items across 1 column then the rest in two columns (or more), but that is kind of "it".

For my own needs I want areas populated with story teasers all over the place, so the traditional front page is not for me. 4 years ago a looked for a solution for this and there were lots of front page type components, but they didn't really do the job so I gave up. This time round I experimented first of all with the Latest News module which can be focussed on different sections (i.e. I could have a few of them with different content in them) but they only list the title which was not for me.

My next experiment was my old friend the contentitem module which has now been renamed to mod_placehere. This module is build by Eike Pierstorff and you can find his blog here http://www.diebesteallerzeiten.de. This is such a superb module. It was useful 4 years ago for featuring a item in a position or perhaps a list of items in a position, but it has come on leaps and bounds. Eike seems very receptive for ideas and input and pretty responsive. This has to be my number 1 fave module.

Now I have what I need for my front page, I can essentially place loads of mod_placehere components anywhere I need on the front page to achieve what I need.

So the jury is out for me, I am going to build my own template, I will have to learn a bit from the other templates but I am pretty confident that I can achieve what I need in look and feel by going my own way. Don't let me stop you using a pre-made template they are really excellent.