NetTuts+ published new Joomla Theme Tutorial, explained in detail. The author of this tutorial Ryan Olson is Joomla Theme Development Expert.

Current tutorial will demonstrate how to proceed from design to deployment of a complete Joomla template theme, including core override and template option parameters that you can use and abuse to your hearts content. This tutorial Around Free PSD and HTML / CSS Source for Free Download.

Joomla! provides plenty of flexibility when displaying your Web content. Whether you are using Joomla! for a blog site, news or a Web site for a company, you'll find one or more content styles to showcase your information. You can also change the style of content dynamically depending on your preferences. Joomla! calls how a page is laid out a layout. Use the guide below to understand which layouts are available and how you might use them.

Content

Joomla! makes it extremely easy to add and display content. All content is placed where your mainbody tag in your template is located. There are three main types of layouts available in Joomla! and all of them can be customised via parameters. The display and parameters are set in the Menu Item used to display the content your working on. You create these layouts by creating a Menu Item and choosing how you want the content to display.

Blog Layout

Blog layout will show a listing of all Articles of the selected blog type (Section or Category) in the mainbody position of your template. It will give you the standard title, and Intro of each Article in that particular Category and/or Section. You can customise this layout via the use of the Preferences and Parameters, (See Article Parameters) this is done from the Menu not the Section Manager!

Blog Archive Layout

A Blog Archive layout will give you a similar output of Articles as the normal Blog Display but will add, at the top, two drop down lists for month and year plus a search button to allow Users to search for all Archived Articles from a specific month and year.

List Layout

Table layout will simply give you a tabular list of all the titles in that particular Section or Category. No Intro text will be displayed just the titles. You can set how many titles will be displayed in this table by Parameters. The table layout will also provide a filter Section so that Users can reorder, filter, and set how many titles are listed on a single page (up to 50)

Wrapper

Wrappers allow you to place stand alone applications and Third Party Web sites inside your Joomla! site. The content within a Wrapper appears within the primary content area defined by the "mainbody" tag and allows you to display their content as a part of your own site. A Wrapper will place an IFRAME into the content Section of your Web site and wrap your standard template navigation around it so it appears in the same way an Article would.

Content Parameters

The parameters for each layout type can be found on the right hand side of the editor boxes in the Menu Item configuration screen. The parameters available depend largely on what kind of layout you are configuring.

Got a question? With more than 140,000 members, the online forums at forum.joomla.org are a great resource for both new and experienced users. Go ahead, ask your toughest questions, the community is waiting to see what you're going to do with your Joomla! site.

Do you want to show off your new Joomla! Web site? Go ahead, we have a section dedicated to that on our forum.

Do you want to join in?

If you think working with Joomla! is fun, wait until you start working on it. We're passionate about helping Joomla! Users make the jump to becoming contributing members of the community, so there are many ways you can help Joomla!'s development:

• Submit news about Joomla!. We syndicate all Joomla! related news on our news portal. If you have some Joomla! news that you would like to share with the community, please submit your short story, article, announcement or review here.
• Report bugs and request features in our trackers. Please read Reporting Bugs, for details on how we like our bug reports served up
• Submit patches for new and/or fixed behaviour. Please read Submitting Patches, for details on how to submit a patch.
• Join the developer forums and share your ideas for how to improve Joomla!. We're always open to suggestions, although we're likely to be sceptical of large-scale suggestions without some code to back it up.
• Join any of the Joomla! Working Groups and bring your personal expertise to the Joomla! community. More info about the different working groups can be found on the Working Group Roll Call.

That's all you need to know if you'd like to join the Joomla! development community.

As with previous releases, Joomla! provides a unified and easy-to-use framework for delivering content for Web sites of all kinds. To support the changing nature of the Internet and emerging Web technologies, Joomla! required substantial restructuring of its core functionality and we also used this effort to simplify many challenges within the current user interface. Joomla! 1.5 has many new features.

A lot of different languages are available for the Back-end, but by default this language may not be installed. If you want a translated Back-end, get your language pack and install it using the Extension Installer. After this, go to the Extensions Menu, select Language Manager and make your language the default one. Your Back-end will be translated immediately.

Users who have access rights to the Back-end may choose the language they prefer in their Personal Details parameters. This is of also true for the Front-end language.

A good place to find where to download your languages and localised versions of Joomla! is on our Help Site.

Yes! Prior to Joomla! 1.5, only the text values of an Article and only for ISO-8859-1 encoding was allowed in the PDF rendition. With the new PDF library in place, the complete Article including images is rendered and applied to the PDF. The PDF generator also handles the UTF-8 texts and can handle any character sets from any language. The appropriate fonts must be installed but this is done automatically during a language pack installation.

Most Articles will be assigned to a Section and Category. In many cases, you might not know where you want it to appear so put the Article in the Uncategorized Section/Category. The Articles marked as Uncategorized are handled as static content.

To completely remove an Article, select the Articles that you want to delete and move them to the Trash. Next, open the Article Trash in the Content Menu and select the Articles you want to delete. After deleting an Article, it is no longer available as it has been deleted from the database and it is not possible to undo this operation.

Mambots have been renamed as Plugins.

Mambots were introduced in Mambo and offered possibilities to add plug-in logic to your site mainly for the purpose of manipulating content. In Joomla! 1.5, Plugins will now have much broader capabilities than Mambots. Plugins are able to extend functionality at the framework layer as well.

Well you are reading it right now! This depends on what you want to achieve. If you are new to Joomla! and have no clue how it all fits together, just install the sample data. If you don't like the English sample data because you - for instance - speak Chinese, then leave it out.