Hot on the heels from the excellent Beginning Joomla! from Novice to Professional comes this new title which is far more focussed in terms of its subject matter.

Joomla! Template Design by Tessa Blakeley Silva is another title from Packt Publishing who impressed us highly with their book on PHP Oracle Web Development.

Sadly, it became apparant within a few pages that some over enthusiastic editing appeared to have taken place and the first section or two was full of references to earlier non existent content that had me paging back and forth trying to find it. As a result, it rapdily became somewhat confusing and we were starting to think the book was going to be a serious duffer.

Product	Joomla! Template Design
From	Packt Publishing
	Explains templates both from scratch and modifying existing ones, web standards, Ajax
	Some editing issues, poor screenshots

What we particularly liked was the attention to detail such as warnings about which web page editors messed up the DOCTYPE and how to correct it. There is also a lot of wise recommendations such as using Firefox's various extensions to help validate and debug templates during development.

As the book progresses it shows how to build a template from scratch which really helped reinforce the concepts although there wasn't much on how to try to bend Joomla! away from its traditional layout options or at least ways to make it look that way. We appreciated the emphasis on getting the code right with XHTML and CSS being used throughout and later sections show how to do as much with CSS positioning as possible to help cut down or remove tables as a way for laying out the pages. Also useful were the notes on the more common browser bugs and how to work around them.

The section on finishing the templates off included how to package them up for release and usefully has notes on licencing and the increasingly popular creative commons method of sharing your work.

Section 6 acts as a fairly detailed reference to the various classes, styles and tags Joomla! uses with notes on where they are used. We'd have liked to see rather more depth here though as this sort of information can be quite hard to come by without a lot of digging about.

The last few sections cover dynamic menus, Flash, Ajax and incorporating other useful blocks of code and markup via the Wrapper Menu item. Also useful for some will be the notes on how to achieve the Web 2.0 Nirvana of rounded corners on everything. Some final tips on SEO and possible editor problems finishes it off. The appendix is a full listing of the CSS and markup for the example which is also available as a download.

Conclusion

After an initially rought start, this proved to be a worthwhile book full of useful information that will allow you to create and edit templates with the best of them. Joomla! is a powerful system which has been poorly served by documentation until recently so we're very pleased to see another book that is much needed to help users get to grips with the power available to them.