Migrating or Upgrading Joomla templates to 1.7

Just when you finally figured out how to take your photoshop file and turn it into a fantabulous template in Joomla 1.5, next hing you know Joomla 1.7 is out and throwing all kinds of changes at us.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

Just the basics - http://docs.joomla.org/Upgrading_a_template_from_1.5_to_1.6

AcyMail + Community Builder + Frontend-User-Access

Beautiful combination for easily creating free VIP member zones on your site - I have a simple Community Builder registration form that adds the member to a group they select (giving them access to their category of information via Frontend-User-Access) and adding them to an autoresponder lesson series a-la AcyMail.
All I need now is to figure out how to preselect the choice based on URL variables.

I love you Media 65! - Made a custom Joomla template in 45 minutes!

I cannot believe the brilliance of the Joomla Dreamweaver Extension available from Media 65. Easily write all the code you need to transform your Dreamweaver template into a Joomla template - no matter how intimidated you were to start with.

http://dumbitdown.com/?q=node/1
This is NOT an affiliate link.

I switched the site at http://www.eaglepainting.ca in about 45 minutes - and kept the look the same. Granted it is a VERY simple layout but the concepts apply across the board.

What a feeling of freedom. This is exactly the tool I needed to truly customize my client Joomla sites. I had been playing with customizing rockettheme templates for some time but they are a bit of over killl on a simple site like Eagle Painting.
And this extension is available for Joomla 1.5 and 1.6.

Order of Contact Form

Finally found how to re-order the contact form layout.

It is in com_contact/views/contact/tmpl/default_address.php

Make sure you grab the surrounding if statement.

NOw I can put the information box above the address and phone at last.

Mentoring a new web designer

for Christmas I got a phone call from a friend of a friend who wants to start a web design business.... using Joomla!

This ties in perfectly with a new suite of products I am creating to teach people how to start a web design business... using Joomla.

So he gets a mentor and I get a guinea pig. :)

WAMP server and Skype don't share nice

Having trouble using WAMP for local Joomla development? I discover that Skype was hogging port 80 - same port as WAMP uses. There are geeky work arounds - I just close Skype when I am using WAMPserver.

Can we create this with Joomla?

Absolutely