What exactly is Morph for Joomla?

The past 2 weeks I have spent much time in contemplation of the entire concept of Morph. How are we going to explain to the Joomla world exactly what it is? Why do we truly believe this has the ability to transform the way people build websites using Joomla?

The entire concept is very clear in our minds, but it does appear to be some confusion when it comes to the question of…

• exactly what is the Morph framework for Joomla?
• how it can be used to benefit Joomla developers in building websites?

I’d like to add clarity to some of the principles of Morph, address certain misconceptions and give a clearer understanding of what Morph is.

Possibilities become limitless with imagination

A fear of mine (and I know of Chris as well) is that we are too imaginative for our own good.

In creating Morph we have re-invented the preverbal wheel to some degree, but I assure you it is all for good reasons. If you have looked over our information website for Morph, you may have noticed many new concepts we have introduced to the Joomla community:

• Themelets instead of traditional Joomla templates.
• This component we call Configurator, to use over the conventional way of setting options in Joomla templates.
• Not to mention Morph’s main features which we have named MenuFX, PageFX, ChromeFX, ModuleFX and ContentFX.

Although at first glance Morph may seem to be complex, but that is not the same thing as difficult or hard to use. I believe that power lies within complexity and that usability is required to help the user harness that power, while at the same time not feeling overwhelmed even when using a complex system.

This is something we worked extremely hard on ensuring. Even though we have built in hundreds of features and ways to control a website with Morph installed, it remains easy, fast and intuitive.

Those who have used Morph will attest to this because it gives them the ability to carry out a plethora of tasks that would usually be done by digging in the code:

• Among the more basic options are things like: upload and add your logo and favicon, set backgrounds, font colors, link colors, website width and column layouts.
• More advanced options available are for example: the ability to change the html output of blocks of content for specific styling, convert blocks from a normal output to become tabs or a set of accordions etc.

When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge

There are other frameworks out there for Joomla, and they seem to be popping up faster than ever, but Morph is very different.

We always knew that introducing new concepts to the Joomla community would not be easy, but we also knew the benefits it would bring would make it worth it. These new, apparently complicated concepts are the reason we believe Morph is different and exactly why we introduced them. I’m going to attempt to explain them in a little more detail as simply as I can.

All of these new concepts have been introduced for very good reasons and were meticulously planned in great detail roughly a year ago. So why did we decide on this approach, why change and re-invent the wheel? The answer is simple… to make it better.

Perhaps it is our explanation and even naming conventions that are the cause of the confusion and I guess because it is new, it’s inherently confusing. So let us try and make sense of all of this in a simple explanation, here goes…

The traditional way & the Morph way

Morph is a normal Joomla template in the real sense of the word, but it is engineered very differently and made up of a few parts. The result however is identical to using a normal Joomla template – the main differences are in the setup and usage.

If you choose to download and install a Joomla template from any provider, you load it after installation and your website will look similar to the template you downloaded.

With Morph it is not all that different, you just choose a themelet you like instead of a template. This is because Morph is the template, but only providing a structure or base. The themelet is needed to make it look like you see on one of our demos.

First thing to know is that Morph is made up of 3 main parts (in comparison to only one with a traditional Joomla template). There is the template itself which we have engineered to be a framework. Then there is the themelet (skin) to make it pretty and a component to manage the different options. Lets look at these 3 parts in more detail.

Morph – this is the Joomla template that is always installed and is the foundation of everything else, does not look like anything and has no styling.

Themelet – the skin or child theme, is a template inside the main template so to speak, but it is completely separated.

Configurator – a Joomla component that firstly helps you install both itself, the Morph template and the themelet/skin and also set the options for both Morph and the themelet as well as many other useful options for your website.

What is the difference between a template and a themelet?

As previously mentioned, Morph is a Joomla template but only half of it is in the template itself… it is the structure, the brains and the brawn (power). The other half, the half that provides all the images and visual css, is separated and kept in a different folder.

This separation helps create a template that can have different appearances/skins applied to it without changing any of the structure or features set on your website. Different skins, which we call themelets, can be applied and managed very easily using the Configurator component.

In short, Morph is a Joomla template that can contain one or multiple themelets. Both the template and themelet have options which are controlled using the Configurator component.

Who’s Morph aimed at?

Beginners to Joomla and even css, do not need to know how to make a themelet to be able to build a website for Joomla using Morph. They can use themelets we create as a starting point.

Once setup, it’s not very different from using any other Joomla template, in fact, it is easier than the traditional methods because users have total control of so many aspects of their website.

More advanced Joomla users who want to build websites from custom designs, will find that the process of coding a design to work with Joomla using Morph is much faster than traditional Joomla templating.

There is no need for coding many of the features or structure, you dive straight into the css. Morph cuts out the building of the xhtml and development of lots of features common to a project.

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Tags: development, framework, joomla 1.5, Morph, themelets, usability