Releasing a Joomla template is harder than you might imagine

I have been on the front end of Joomla for years. Creating Web sites for clients, myself, friends, anybody who would pay, and even a few who wouldn’t. I have always had a general idea of what it took for a template company to produce a template, but no real proof to validate my assumptions. JoomlaJunkie recently hired me on staff and gave me all the proof I needed to discover it is way more complicated then I ever dreamed.

Joomla templates are pretty straight forward. You come up with a design for your template, map it out in Photoshop or Fireworks, create the basic shell of code with html and php, add modules positions, wrap it all up, make some screenshots and you are off. Seems easy right? Well making a Joomla template using that formula is similar to saying a car is basically a pencil sketch, a motor and some gas and throw it down the assembly line. There are millions of steps in between that make that car work. Then once you have that car, you certainly want more features then a motor, 4 tires and a wheel. Joomla is no different. I am going to explain some of what goes on from the perspective of a template company so you can better understand the process and what it takes to create beautiful, and highly functional templates for people every month.

Every template starts off with some sort of idea, concept, or layout desire. the designer might see a Web site that has a design idea he likes, or he finds inspiration in his surroundings, or you just start doodling. Every developer has some process he takes. Once the idea has been planted it’s time to build upon it. Here at JoomlaJunkie we are big fans of Coda as it allows us to write code from scratch and it does not insert all sorts of extraneous code that will hinder our sites performance. Joomla sites all need some basic code in the header as well as information on what modules are going to be used. We choose to position all of Joomla elements using pure CSS. Using CSS you can separate what is information, and what is design. This type of coding is the industry standard, unfortunately the industry does not all follow it. We pride ourselves in going the extra mile to make sure our templates are 100% compliant. Not everybody can say that, or cares to put the time into doing that.

Once the general layout of the site is setup a very basic template file is created. We start adding features such as our new menu system, different variables for easy customization, effects, etc. The difficult part is understanding when you have enough features in a template. Many template companies jam pack so many effects, whizzers, sliders, shinys, poppers, and so forth into their site, it severely hinders the site performance. Just because a template can slide information 14 different ways on its demo page, does not always mean you will be able to figure out how to do it on yours, or worse yet, will your viewers even care? Too many features can actually slow down older browsers making the user experience terrible for your customers with less powerful systems. We go out of our way to make sure we deliver the best balance of flashy features, with clean and effective design.

So, we now have added the features we want into the template. The template is about 50% of the way to being in the publics hands. Lets get it all prepped.

Prepping the template consists of multiple levels of diagnosing, creating content, and debugging. Installing and reinstalling the template on a variety of systems and setups is vital in finding installation related bugs. This is done frequently as the lead developer is debugging various issues and will frequently ask for multiple Joomla installations to be built and rebuilt. All the while other developers are creating documentation about how the template works, how to set it up, what features are included, screenshots and more.

Typically a template will take on a life of it’s own and continue to evolve over the course of it’s development. Features might not work out as planned, additional items are added or removed–the product is growing up. With any child growing up, it will need additional attention and items revised as the development cycle progresses.

The team works very closely to make sure all facets of the template come together in a reasonable time frame and with a exceptional level of quality and features. Installation guides are created and revised, product pages are amended, links are updated, The template is checked for errors and checked for compliance. Screenshots are made….

…then sometimes everything changes.

Have you ever worked on something really hard and put a lot of effort into it, then came back to it a few days later and decided there was a far more effective way to do it? Well this happens sometimes with Joomla templates as well. In the case of our May template Aurora we had a 90% finished product and felt there must be a better way to deliver the features we wanted to give people, with no need to touch actual php or css. We wanted a graphical interface for people to change the background or colors. We wanted to break out of the box and do things better. revisions like this set projects back weeks if not months sometimes, but the end result only benefits you the user.

We went back a few steps and had to rewrite most of our knowledge-base articles, but in the long run we have made a much easier to modify template for our clients. What started off as a simple personal blog design for our developer turned into a revolutionary and highly innovative product 3 months later.

So here I sit, working for JoomlaJunkie for 2 months now. I have learned template development is complicated, time consuming and ever evolving. Over the course of those 2 months we have released two templates, and are on track to double our production. We have numerous people working full time who are passionate about making you look good for your Web site, client, or business. Creating amazing templates takes time. It is more then slapping some generic html into a file, inserting pics, and wrapping it up. It takes almost a month from inception to final product to be able to deliver the best we can possibly offer to you. I am proud to work for JoomlaJunkie now that I see the incredible attention to detail and quality that is involved in these templates. A quality that is not consistent on this high level across the industry.

So what do you think about our templates? Did you know it was this complicated?

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Tags: css, development, Joomla, templates