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Packt has announced a new book on designing Joomla! templates. Written by Tessa Blakeley Silver, Joomla! Template Design is a complete guide for web designers to all aspects of designing unique website templates for the free Joomla! PHP Content Management System. For more information, please visit http://www.packtpub.com/Joomla-Template-Design-open-source-PHP-MySQL/book

The Joomla! template is a series of files within the Joomla! CMS that controls the presentation of content. A template is the basic foundation design for viewing a Joomla! website. To produce the effect of a "complete" website, the template works hand in hand with the content stored in the Joomla! databases. The Joomla! development team recently announced that they are committing themselves to the GPL license and that all propriety extensions will need to comply to the same license. This has caused some confusion concerning the distribution of templates. This is because a template package is made up of different files; some that the GNU GPL applies to and others that it doesn’t. Joomla!’s official stance is that non-code elements of a template package are just data acted upon by the software and may be licensed in any way that the author deems fit. Therefore, the current uncertainty over third party development of templates will require more users to create their own quality, professional-level templates. Joomla! Template Design is a well-crafted, easy-to-use book and a complete guide to creating Joomla! templates for a website. It guides users through setting up a basic workflow for Joomla! template design, debugging and validating the template code, creating drop-down menus, interactive forms, and dynamic forms for a site, and packaging up the finished template in a ZIP file for users. The book explains how to deal with and use multiple templates in the same site. It advises users on creating beautiful Joomla! designs using CSS rather than tables in your templates. The book offers guidelines on using animations and other effects in Joomla! templates and provides tricks for tweaking existing templates. This book is aimed at web designers who want to create their own unique templates for Joomla!. Readers should have basic knowledge of Joomla! and also some knowledge of CSS and HTML, and using Dreamweaver for coding purposes. 

Joomla! Template Design is published by Packt and will be released in July 2007. For more information, please visit

http://www.packtpub.com/Joomla-Template-Design-open-source-PHP-MySQL/book