Template trickery

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.


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How to remove the Joomla generator tag - reloaded

Why you should do that? Humm, there are arguments why yo should get rid off or keep it, but it's a matter of personal choice, mainly. The methods to removing the meta name generator tag for Joomla varies between versions. I discussed couple of ways to do it  in an earlier tip. Here is a new one, working in Joomla 2.5!

A hidden gem - the Modal script shipped with Joomla

Sometimes you are looking hard elsewhere to find an useful, much needed extensions, just to find out, that the tool is already in your toolbox. This is the case with the modal script shipped with Joomla, which is a great tool (even with the known limitations) to add a basic lightbox function to your site without needing anything else, but a few lines of code.
Here are few examples of what you can do with!

iPad and iPhone - how to design a Joomla site for them

What you must be aware of, when designing a Joomla page that should work on iPad and iPhone too? It is enough to have a proper template and the proper tools to display the respective versions when your Joomla site is displayed on these devices?

Customize your page using CSS tricks based on active menu alias

There are lots of ways to make your page unique in Joomla, and there are interesting ideas on how to make your template even more powerful.

One of tricks not very often used and widespread is relying in one of the tricks I published regarding to available PHP tricks you can use to enhance your template.

PHP code snippets to conditionally add things to your template

The Joomla ItemID-related management of modules is a powerful tool, but sometimes you need to show/hide parts of your site on two special cases not covered by this tool: when you need to show/hide things regardless of the active ItemID - for example on all detail listings page of a given component, or when you need to deal with a component which have poor support of ItemIDs - as VirtueMart, which is notoriously misbehaving in this regard.

Deprecated: Function split() is deprecated - reloaded

In another post about Function eregi() deprecated I provided some readily fixed Joomla 1.0 files to overcome issues related with upgrading to PHP 5.3 for Joomla 1.0 sites. But since a Joomla site is not built only from the core code, but there are other third party add-ons too, not only these older Joomla sites can be plagued by bad coding practices. The most problematic issues are related with templates. Most of the addons are fixed already, but you might have templates with unsupported functions. Here are couple of tricks wich might help you fix them!