Joomla Templates-How to Set up and Modify Joomla Templates in 3 Simple Ways

In this article, I will show you how to edit Joomla templates in 3 simple ways. You can choose to customize the themes in any one or a combination of these.

But before we go ahead, let me just say that every Joomla template will come with its own ways of customizing it. But every one of them, whether free or commercial templates, will have at least the first two options of editing them.

Without much ado, let’s plunge into the details, shall we?

1. HTML: The Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard language used to create web pages on the Internet. It stipulates and controls how the web pages are displayed and related (linked) to one another, among others.

If you are comfortable with HTML (you can learn it in a day or less; it’s like abbreviations of English words and makes senses easily unlike programming languages like C++, etc), you can open up the set of HTML files that comes with the Joomla template and fiddle with them-to add, edit or delete sections and features that you want to.

This is perhaps one of the easiest way to edit Joomla templates even if you are not familiar with the intricate technicalities of designing and developing Joomla websites (or any type of sites).

2. CSS: Cascading style sheets (CSS) are a set of codes/tags that stipulates how your web pages are formatted and displayed. These include headings, text and background colors, etc. Since a template usually has all of it web pages having certain uniform formatting, like same text colors or font types, these are saved in CSS files that can be “called” whenever a new page is added to the site so that you don’t have to edit all these details individually and manually. Every Joomla template also comes with a set of CSS files. You can edit the Joomla template by opening these files (depending on which aspects of the look and feel of the template you want to modify) and edit them accordingly.

3. Inbuilt Template Customizer: A lot of the premium and commercial Joomla templates come with a built-in template customizer that lets you point and click your way to edit the Joomla template. If your template comes with this feature, this might be the easiest way to customize them without having to even fiddle with the accompanying HTML and CSS files. If you can edit and format a word processor document, you should be able to customize your Joomla templates using the built-in customizer without any trouble.

In any of these three cases, you can access the customizable files by logging in to the admin area of your site by going to the /administrator directory, clicking on the “Extensions” tab and opening the “Template Manager” section. You then select the template that you want, click the “Edit” button at the top right corner or the page (depending on the version of the Joomla CMS that you have installed) and just follow the clear and instinctively-designed editing area to select and edit the Joomla templates to match your style of look, feel or even ego! Hey, it’s your website, your template and you can edit it in whatever depth or length you want.