Template is an essential part of a Joomla site. It's not only simple HTML/CSS/PHP/JS wich let's you show your content, it's a genuine shell with endless of possibilities for success - and failure. There are defined not only how your site will look like for your human visitors, but also for searchengines too. So it's your primary tool in your SEO efforts.
And also it's first line of your defence too. Lots of security holes can be opened with a badly written template! And also, don't forget, that might be the biggest resource hog - so the first place to optimize your site's performance.
More: has a tremendous amount of power built in. You should unleash that, and master it.
What if you need to load a module inside a Joomla component?
Simple, not? Theory says, that you need to add this code to the template override of desired output, and you're done!
<jdoc:include type="module" name="mymoduleposition" />
Well, not allways..
A client called me one of these days with this request. He told me, that what was once a simple one click action to print, email or edit an article in frontend in Joomla 1.5 has became an uncomfortable, two click process, which in some devices proved to be increasingly difficult. After a bit of digging around I found for him an easy to implement template override which make him happy.
You might think, that this is an easy job, you just set up sh404SEF, and you're done! Maybe... but sometimes this might be really wrong. Especially if you have a multilingual site, and a properly built Joomla 1.7+ template.
Sometimes the simplest problems are giving you headaches... here is one of them. One of my clients recently requested to build a mobile-aware (responsive) site with phone numbers callable with one click from mobile devices.
After fooling around a while with testing all sorts of complicated solutions, I found it to be a very easy homerun, in fact:
Did you already seen that since the advent of Joomla 1.6 the blog view has been changed? Let me refresh your memory! In Joomla 1.0 and 1.5 the Leading Articles - the articles on the top of Blog view - where shown on full by default, and for the rest of articles only the Article Intro part was shown. With Joomla 1.6 this has been changed, for all articles in a Blog view is shown only the introtext. You didn't even noticed that, right? Me either, until one of my clients has specifically requested the feature.
The Page Class Suffix is a parameter in Joomla! content Menu Items. It is set in the Menu Item: [Edit] screen under the "Parameters (Advanced)" section. This will cause Joomla! to either add a new CSS class or modify the existing CSS class for elements in this specific Menu Item layout.
