Template Overrides

Elevate is the first Joomla Bamboo template release that is Joomla 1.5 only. So that meant that it gave us a chance to dive right into the template override system in Joomla 1.5 and it must be said that we really like what we found. The override system gives you complete access to the core output of Joomla enabling you to shape the theme as much as you could ever want.

The template comes with numerous overrides and they all occur out of the box and are triggered according to the menu type you choose to use. There are html overrides for the frontpage layout, blog layout, section and category layout, login.

The benefits of using the new overrides is multi-faceted but in this instance you get a 100% pure css layout when Joomla renders the page. This means there are no more tables to clutter the already tableless layout of the template.

Front Page Layout: The front page layout is actually a little sneaky in that we placed our favourite image grabbing script and placed it in the override. It basically grabs the first image found in an article and places it in a unique layout that is separate to the markup that you use in the content item itself. A lot of front page news modules use this sort of method but it happens inside a module.

Login Override: The login override is nothing new and has been a feature of our joomla themes since June 2008 Vision. Elevate has a handy little login override that slims down the output and makes the login appear as a slimline horizontal login. you can see it at the bottom of this page.

Alot of the other overrides occur under the hood and probably wont be noticed that much for everyday browsing, but if you are familiar with the old Joomla output and feel inclined to check the source file of the template output you will see that we have said goodbye to most of the tables and have created some semantic markup that makes more sense from not just an seo point of you but also a usability point of view.