Joomla Tips #7 : Template Packaging
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Written by Editor in Chief
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Sunday, 08 January 2006 |
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 There are thousands of free templates for Joomla and Mambo out there. Just here at JoomlaHacks.com, you can download some of the best free templates. Some of the template coder in the community has the eye for design. But I can't help to notice most of them really know nothing about proper packaging.
Yes. Most of them probably got the skeleton source from Rhuk Solar Flare and placed their own jpegs and index.php. So when you try to install them, it just fail. But of course, for some of us who knows, a template package can just be copied to the template folder if the installation fails.
Here are just some packaging tips for template developers:
- ZIP it. This is just simple and I don't know why some of them use RAR. Template installer won't install RAR. If you need include extra files such as PSDs, just put it in a seperate folder such as "/psd". Also, do not forget to include a blank "index.html" in your folders to protect the server from leech and hackers.
- ZIP the content, not the folder. For example, your template folder is "awesome_template". Do not zip that folder, zip the contents within that folder. Because if you zip the main folder, again, template installer cannot install it.
- Verify your templateDetails.xml. This file tells Joomla what files to be copied in the template folder. So make sure everything is in there.
- Preview image. And don't forget to inlcude the preview image which should be 206x145 pixels.
Standard Template Architecture:
- index.php - the main template code.
- templateDetails.xml - template paclage information.
- template_thumbnail.png - template preview image.
- /css/template_css.css - the template's css file in css folder.
- /images/ - the default image folder.
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