Flash and Joomla News by Eyezberg

Joomla is a CMS, or Content Management System.

This means, simplified, that it is coded to allow for easy setup of the site, content addition and editing, publishing etc..
This content will consist mostly of text, and some media such as images, video, pdf and other files.

What's all this got to do with templates?

Well, all this content will have to be displayed to your visitors somehow! You could of course just have any old page with a block of text, and a few images in there, and then a list of links.
But this CMS is not only about managing your content, it also allows you to format and present it in nice ways very easily by selecting a template.

Templates are in fact the "presentation layer" around your content, they add images around the text for borders and buttons, the CSS file is used to style all the various parts of your text: headers, links, titles, buttons, input fields.. you name it, you got it.

A template consists generally of

1. an images folder with the various presentation elements it uses;
   
2. sometimes a thumbnail to present the templates look,
   
3. a CSS file (style sheet) -sometimes more than one for print, screen, different text sizes etc.., 
   
4. and the main "workhorse", the index.php file in the template folder.

As explained in Part One , a Joomla Template is a normal html file (with the .php extension though) with small bits of PHP in it to load the CMS data.

Example:

        <?php if ( mosCountModules( 'banner') ) { ?>
        <span class="banner"><?php mosLoadModules('banner', -1); ?></span>

This willl load ALL published modules assigned to the "banners" position -generally only the banners module- into the spot where this code appears, if there are any modules assigned. If not, nothing happens, which is useful to collapse empty module positions.

There are two Joomla functions used here:

1. mosCountModules will check if there are any modules assigned to a specific position at all
2. mosLoadModules will load all assigned published modules for that position sequentially in order of appearance in Module Manager admin screen.

As you may have noticed, the Count function takes only one parameter: name of the position to check modules for.

mosLoadModules

this function can take two parameters:

1. position name to all modules for
2. display styles (-1 in this example).
   These can be:
   0 = (default display) Modules are displayed in a column.
   1 = Modules are displayed horizontally, each in one table cell.
   -1 = Modules are displayed as raw output and without titles.
   -2 = Modules are displayed in X-Joomla format.(xhtml)
   -3 = Modules are displayed in a format that allows, for example, stretchable rounded corners by using divs.

To learn more about the display styles, please read on at the official Help site . 

Now we know about modules, what else is there to be pulled into the HTML skeleton from the CMS?