website design, content management system's and Joomla development

Everytime I run in to this problem, I swear I'm going to write a proper solution for it so that I can reuse it. Of course sometimes it's just easier to get er done. Finding time to make nice components is of a far greater task than actually creating them.

I have seen there are plenty of people on the Joomla forums who are going to all sorts of extremes to do this...

Here's the quick and dirty:

You want users to be able to log in to your site, create an article and edit it in the future, and be able to control whether that article is published or not.

Problem is, you want these users to have Author rights not publisher rights.

There seems to be some confusion amongst many Joomla users as to how to apply styles to the popup windows in Joomla like the Print function, and the E-mail this link to a friend function. Yes I agree, they look absolutely horrid if you don't change these to use the same as your template.

Now, you could go hack the Joomla core, and add links to your stylesheet, but I never like doing this because if there is a security update that overwrites this file, you no longer have your styling, and you've lost all that work.

If your completing your own template, then I'm sure you have run in to this problem before. Removing the borders around the pdf/print/email icons is pretty easy, and a must. They look pretty ugly otherwise. This is a quick and best practice for removing these pesky link borders.

If you create your own templates for Joomla, or have used templates that are not completely developed, you are bound to run into having to style the hastip or tooltip popup box that you get when you hover over the edit buttons beside each article when logged in to the site.

To style these elements, you need to add the following classes in your style sheet:

Originally Joomla shows the Creation date of article's to be in the following format: 'Monday, 25 August 2008 19:19' or something very similar. This is overkill for me, and makes the template look cluttered. I wanted to change this to show AUG25.

The following article will show you how to customise the look of your Joomla articles and category blog using CSS. We will wrap our objects in <div> tags and do away with the table structure that comes with Joomla. I will use this site as the example because it currently does not have a custom layout (I'm building the site as I write this), and so that you can see the end result in this article.