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[markling]

... Is out, in the members area.

It's a bit earlier than normal. We're trying to make it so that updates for a month actually come out at the *start* of the month. Good idea? It means that you guys who have just digested the April update get a double helping.

I'm pretty grateful I'm on the other side of the world from my staff who have had to transcribe, edit, design and slap together two of these back to back ;)

Enjoy! Let me know if there are any problems.

Mark

 

[stevenar]

Hey Mark

I just watched your interview with Sean Gravener and that last question was really helpful for me. But It seems REALLY difficult to customize everything on one of those sites. As you know for my site my visitors love "eye candy". I would pretty much have to make graphics for every single thing on one of those sites. I'm very intrested in it but i have no idea if i have the knowledge to do it. Does his video lessons include stuff on how to customize things? I'm sure he will show you how to customize stuff like... an icon or something.. but an entire site? Seems like he focuses on how to edit things and add features using just the templates mostly.

Let me know. Thanks.

 

[markling]

From my research into Joomla, it seems to me that if you are comfortable using HTML and CSS to design websites, it's not *too* big a jump to designing Joomla templates. It's a matter of designing the look of the modules. What I would do is take a template that seems to work well enough in terms of layout, then pull them apart to find the images and CSS to modify.

I don't think you'd need to create images for *everything* on your site. For instance, your side navigation header images could be a standard background image, with the text over top being set in Joomla. I don't think it would be much more work than if you were creating your site with HTML and CSS.

Because Joomla is an open source product there are a whole heap of tutorials on the subject. Here's a good site I've found:

http://www.compassdesigns.net/tutorials ... tutorials/

With regards to Authority Site Pro... I've had a look inside and it doesn't look like they go into particularly great depth about graphically customizing the templates. I think the strength in ASP is that they've put together the package so that all these separate plugins and things are working together well and it's ready to go.

That said, and this is some really bad timing on our part, Authority Site Pro has just closed its doors to new members. They'll be revamping it and opening again soon with more features. In the meantime you should take a look at those tutorials and see if it still seems over your head. If you can learn HTML and CSS I really think you'll be able to learn this too.

All the best,
Mark

 

[stevenar]

ooo nice tutorials thanks.

I'm pretty sure i could handle stuff like the basic layout. Like putting the navagation and and content area in just seems like customizing some of the smaller stuff like once you go into your profile theres so many things I would like to customize such as the background color.. the border around all your friends.. and millions of other small things..

Another thing is allowing members to upload movies and search through the movies and view them was the main reason i wanted to learn Joomla.

If I wanted to add a feature like "Recently Added Movies" on the front page of my website would i pretty much just need to go into the Movies Component then specify what page i want the movie to go to then put in a location on that page for it to go and it will be done? Is it pretty much that easy?

 

[markling]

Yes, it is pretty much that easy. In fact, that defaults to being on, unless you turn it off.

regards,
Mark