Beginner's Guide

Chapter 18
Angie Radtke
The Beez Template
A template usually contains more than you see at first sight.
The term template is usually connected with the visual appearance of a website. But in addition to
the design, it is distinguished by the way of the technical implementation. It determines where the
content is located within the flow of documents, when and where certain modules can be switched on
and disappear, whether custom error pages are used and what markup - version of HTML should be
used.
Some users will certainly be familiar with the Beez template in Joomla 1.5. Both, beez_20" and beez5
are visually very different from the design of the previous version. For the design I used a neutral grey for
the elementary components of the template, such as the menu to provide a solution that harmonizes
with many colours.
Even at that time, I wanted to develop a standard compliant, easily accessible and adaptable
template. I consciously had chosen the colour purple, in the hope that many designers would take the
code, modify it and make it freely available. I had hoped for a variety of many new free templates. This
has unfortunately not occurred.
Another mistake was probably that I did not communicate clearly enough what the real aim was.
The output was structured in a way so that almost any design could be implement in a simple and
straightforward manner, with only slight modifications in the CSS. I kept this principle in the new
versions of Beez. Additionally, there is a more accessible JavaScript and in beez5 a small portion of
HTML5
74
. Beez_20 does not require template overrides. Layout tables are finally not in use anymore in
Joomla. The new HTML-based output follows the structure of the old Beez template.
The CSS class names have been renamed and unified for a better understanding. This is a
tremendous advantage for template designers. The HTML output from the Joomla Standard is clean
and well-formed. You do not need to use template overrides anymore to generate clean, standard-
compliant code. The technical capabilities of both Beez templates are almost identical. They differ only
in their graphic design. The Beez5 version is also designed for the use of HTML5.
•
Accessibility
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide
Monday, 30 January 2012! Page 201
74
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5