See Every Module Position in a Joomla Template
You are working with a template someone else built and you need to know what its module positions are called and where they land on the page. Joomla can draw…
Templates & Frontend
Template building, markup, CSS and frontend techniques.
Stop Extensions Loading Assets Your Template Does Not Use
You build a template without Bootstrap, and Bootstrap turns up in the <head> anyway. Something else on the page asked for it. Here is how to find what, and how…
Your Main Menu Has Too Many Items
Look at enough newly built sites and the same menu appears every time: thirteen items across the top, each one added because somebody asked for it, none of…
What Belongs on a Front Page, and What Does Not
Most front pages are not designed, they are accumulated. Every request from every stakeholder gets added and nothing is ever removed. This is a pass over a…
Images That Are Killing Your Page Weight
The single most common mistake in site content: take a photo straight off the camera, drop it into an article, set width="640" and consider the job done. The…
Article Markup Mistakes That Break Your Template
Most broken-looking Joomla pages are not template bugs. They are articles written by someone who reproduced the appearance of a list, a heading or a paragraph…
Generate and Cache Derived Images in a Joomla Template
Occasionally a listing needs a thumbnail that CSS cannot produce: a fixed crop with a shaped overlay burned into it, generated from whatever the editor…
Styling and Extending the Joomla Menu Module
Navigation is the part of a template people fight with longest, usually because they are styling markup they have not read. Here is what the menu module…
Icons in a Joomla Template Without the Sprite Sheet Era
Interface icons used to be the slowest part of building a template: export every glyph as a bitmap, pack them into one sprite sheet, then calculate a…
Conditional Layouts in Joomla Templates
A sidebar that leaves a gaping hole when its modules are unpublished is the mark of a template nobody finished. The fix is a handful of conditions in…
jdoc Placeholders and Module Chrome in Joomla 6
A template's entire connection to Joomla runs through a handful of jdoc:include tags. This is what each one renders, and how the wrapper around a module — its…
Make Article Images Link to the Article
On a blog listing, people click the picture. They expect it to open the article, and when nothing happens they usually assume the site is broken rather than…