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Joomla! templates control the look and feel of the website.
There may be several or just one for your website. Once they are installed, you
can edit HTML and CSS for each of the templates right within the backend of the
website. You can assign specific templates to specific pages. There is a
default template which can be used when a new page is created. So, let's jump
into the backend of Joomla! and see where the Template Manager is and how we can
use it to modify our website. So, first of all, we are going to go here
to our login screen and login. Then we are going to go Extensions > Template
Manager. What you see here in the Template Manager are the three templates that
come with Joomla! by default when you install it. The rhuk_ milkyway template
is the one that's currently being used. You can see the star here that
shows that it is the default template. So, it's being used on all pages
of the website. When you roll your mouse over each of the
links here for the template, you get a little pop-up of what each of the templates
look like. So, this is the front end of the website using the rhuk_ milkyway
template. We are going to go back to the backend of the website and look at the
Template Manager a little further. Here let's take a look at the beez template
by selecting this radio button and clicking the Edit button up here in the upper
right-hand corner. You can see that we have two buttons to choose
from: an Edit HTML button and an Edit CSS button. As you would expect when
you click on the Edit HTML button, we get all of the code that makes up the template
for the beez. You have trace of three buttons on the top: Save, Apply, or
Cancel to leave this screen. Save will save your changes and leave the screen,
Apply will apply your changes but leave the screen open so you can continue
to edit, and Cancel will get you out of the screen altogether. We are going to
hit Cancel. Never hit the Back button while you are working
in Joomla! or you will lock up files in the database. You can also edit CSS
by hitting the Edit CSS button. As you see here, this particular template has
many style sheets. The template we are going to build is only going to have only
one style sheet. So, you can have as many as style sheets as you need.
Let's pretend we are going to edit this general.CSS style sheet and we are
going to click the Edit button and as you see here, we have a screen for
editing CSS. Once again, we are not going to make any changes so we are going
to hit the Cancel button, and we are going to Cancel again. There is also
another button that appear on the top called Preview. The Preview button will
give you a preview of the template as you can see here with the beez template
and note that all of the various module positions are called out here. This is
pretty helpful when you try to set up the modules for matching positions in
your template. And we are going to come back to this later. I am going to hit
the Back button up here. Finally, you can assign this beez template
to any page on the website. As you see here under Menu Assignment, currently
it's not assigned to any of the pages on the website. We can change that by selecting
the Select From List radio button. Then selecting a page, say the Home
page, and clicking Save. When I switch back to the front end of the website
and hit the Refresh button, you can see that the whole look of the web page is
changed completely. If I go to the Products page, you will see that we are still
actually in the rhuk_milkyway template. So, these Joomla! templates allow for uniform
control of look and feel including layout and styling across your site. Since
the content of the page is completely separated from the look and feel
of the site, it's easy to change the look in just few clicks. This is a really
powerful feature in Joomla!.