Joomla
Joomla – An Essential Introduction
Joomla is one of the latest and most powerful web design programs available in the market today. It is also one of the most user friendly programs you can find, allowing you to be as creative and as playful as you want. Joomla is an alternative to the already existing software and programs dominating the market for a long time. The main characteristic of Joomla is the different philosophy and mentality behind it, which makes it stand out from anything else you knew so far.
Joomla-Designing
If you are designing for the Joomla! CMS for the first time, you will need to understand that designing a template for a Content Management System such as Joomla! is quite different from designing a web page.
You may be comfortable with creating a design layout in Photoshop or your favorite graphic editor and then using your editor's export feature to generate the image slices and HTML markup required to render the web page. Likewise, you may be more comfortable working with a WYSIWYG editor such as Dreamweaver so that you can clearly see your page layout as you create the CSS and format content for it.
Joomla is different. It holds all the content within several MySQL database tables. What you'll be designing is the shell, which will eventually hold content when it is called from the database by a web user selecting a link on the site.
At the same time, the layout and CSS you create for the template will be automatically applied across many pages (perhaps thousands) depending on how big the site is. This can be quite liberating and overwhelming, or frustrating at the same time.
