Tidying the appearance of your Joomla 2.5 website

Now that you have a very basic three page web-site you probably want to tidy up the appearance. This short guide will explain how you can remove unnecessary information such as unwanted titles, author names, dates and icons. It also explains how to install templates so that the whole layout and style of your site can be changed with the click of a button.

Creating a basic Joomla site | Improving Appearance | Categories & Blog Layouts | Access Control Levels | Installing Extensions

Improving the Appearance

To remove unnecessary information from your articles (such as unwanted titles, author names, dates and icons), go to the control panel and select “Content>Article Manager”.

Then click on the Parameters Icon.

This will open the configuration settings that apply to all your articles.

Leave Show Article Title set to “Yes” if you want each article’s title displayed.

Tick the hide box for all the options between “Author Name” and “Hits”.

Click on Save once you have finished.

Now when you preview your site all the article information that you set to “hide” will be hidden.

Templates

Templates are packages that can completely change the display and layout of your site, altering the style whilst retaining the content, menu structure and any modules previously used. There are 3 templates included within the default Joomla setup but many more are available to download from the Joomla Extension Directory or from commercial sites such as rockettheme, joomlabamboo or yootheme. They are available compressed in ZIP, TAR or RAR format and there is no need to decompress the extensions as the Joomla installer does this for you.

From the control panel go to Extensions > Install/Uninstall. Click on the browse button to locate the zipped file from your computer then click on upload to install. When it has completed an “install successful” message will appear.

Go to Extensions > Template Manager. This lists all the templates currently stored on your site. Only one template can be used at a time. The template set to “default” is the one that is currently used.

To change the template simply tick the selection box next to the template name then click on default.

Click on the Template’s name to edit the settings.

The parameters section of a template (if available) allows you to tweak variations of the display such as background colour or template width (simply click on save to apply the settings). Templates vary in complexity with some having no parameters at all and others providing you with a huge list of variations to choose from.

For more advanced users the HTML and CSS can be edited and saved directly from the Template Manager.

To view the HTML code of the template click on Edit HTML.

To view/edit the CSS files associated with this template click on Edit CSS (then choose the file you wish to edit).

If you are interested in building your own templates a framework masterclass is available here. If you are interested in having a template custom designed for you feel free to contact us.