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[simes123 Friend simes123Join date: March 2014Posts: 5Downloads:0Uploads:0]

#195918

Hi, new to Joomla. Beginning to find my way around after looking at different frameworks, and have settled on building my personal site using the T3 framework.

The T3bsBlank is pretty much how I want my site, especially with the dark theme – particularly in the header area. But I see Purity III and it’s nice range of default layouts that offer me all the flexibility I’d want, without any customisation (at least to start with). But the header area is not to my needs.

I’m keen to keep things as close as standard such that I can benefit from bug fixes etc to framework and templates, and this is where I’m stuck.

Should I customise the header of Purity III to make it look like T3 Blank, and customise the colour schemes to be like the Dark colour scheme of T3 Blank, thus benefitting from all the other nice things about Purity III (all the standard layouts).

Or should I customise T3 Blank, to give me the nice page layouts of Purity III?

I’m not sure which is more effort, or what I can safely customise that won’t be impacted by updates (I don’t want to create an unsupportable monster that can’t benefit from updates).

It’s taken me a couple of months to get my head around Joomla, Frameworks, Templates etc, and I’m willing to dive into the code if required but having read the docs, I’m still not sure how best to approach this! Purity III is almost perfect apart from the header area and the colour scheme, so I’m hoping I can just copy the right CSS files from T3 Blank to get that dark grey colour scheme and make some tweaks to make the header look the same. Could it be that easy?

Sorry for the newbie question!

Simon

[swissa Friend swissaJoin date: November 2011Posts: 1955Downloads:7Uploads:277 Thanks: 175 Thanked: 717 times in 572 posts]

#527312

Hi Simon,

For someone who isn’t a programmer I try to make my life as easy as possible.

When updates come they’ll overwrite the files. To prevent that happening you need to do something similar to having custom.css that doesn’t get overwritten. So for me, I’d go Purity III and add my own new layout and header block.

My way would be to copy the layout I want in the admin backend, and name it swissa_layout. I would then add a new header to ‘blocks’ – swissa_header.php (taking the lead from T3_blank header.php) and call that from my swissa_layout.php. I’d dump all the css files for this new block into custom.css. Hopefully that way the files wouldn’t get overwritten by an update.

Obviously I’d test this all on a dev site not a live one and check any updates on the dev site first. Do regular backups of both sites so that if an update crashes it everything can be quickly rolled back either in the JA Extensions Manager or by restoring a backup. As with any mods you do, time and patience are going to be your friend!

My personal view only. Hope it helps.

[simes123 Friend simes123Join date: March 2014Posts: 5Downloads:0Uploads:0]

#527515

<em>@swissa 417098 wrote:</em><blockquote>Hi Simon,

For someone who isn’t a programmer I try to make my life as easy as possible.

When updates come they’ll overwrite the files. To prevent that happening you need to do something similar to having custom.css that doesn’t get overwritten. So for me, I’d go Purity III and add my own new layout and header block.

My way would be to copy the layout I want in the admin backend, and name it swissa_layout. I would then add a new header to ‘blocks’ – swissa_header.php (taking the lead from T3_blank header.php) and call that from my swissa_layout.php. I’d dump all the css files for this new block into custom.css. Hopefully that way the files wouldn’t get overwritten by an update.</blockquote>

Thanks for the reply. This is the dilemma – if I go Purity III, I have to customise the php in the header block, and do custom CSS, if I go T3bsBlank, the header block is correct. So I’m thinking the T3bsBlank wins in this respect?

<em>@swissa 417098 wrote:</em><blockquote>
Obviously I’d test this all on a dev site not a live one and check any updates on the dev site first. Do regular backups of both sites so that if an update crashes it everything can be quickly rolled back either in the JA Extensions Manager or by restoring a backup. As with any mods you do, time and patience are going to be your friend!

My personal view only. Hope it helps.</blockquote>

It does help thanks – appreciate the response, but it seems the opposite way around to what I was expecting 🙂 I think what I’d gain from Purity III, given the header needs modifying, is the built in sample layouts in the quickstart. Because of my inexperience, that looks to me to be a good headstart in building my site vs the T3bsBlank, but it might be that I can copy those layouts, and then remove entirely the need to customise core features in the template? Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Simon

[swissa Friend swissaJoin date: November 2011Posts: 1955Downloads:7Uploads:277 Thanks: 175 Thanked: 717 times in 572 posts]

#527522

Hi Simon,

It’s a difficult call for you Mein Herr. Perhaps if I give you an analogy it may help in your decision.

Do you need any of the functionality of Purity? Will you use a blog? a corporate layout? Do you need, for the site itself (not the header or the colours) do you need the inbuilt functionality of Purity?

I know which I would choose and I’ve built a fair few sites using T3 Blank. But Purity is based on T3 Blank 🙂 So……;)

Imagine, you go into a car showroom. Do you take the car that is in the colour you want with the sunroof but a small engine or do you take the car with the right engine and many extras but no sunroof? You can always have a sunroof built in; putting a new engine in is hard work. (The core features, better to have too many than too few)

Customising the php is probably easier (as you are just going to steal it from T3 Blank) than writing CSS from scratch and CSS is where all the styling comes from. Whatever you choose you’ll have to tackle the styling. So let’s rob it from T3 Blank and apply it to Purity. We’re only hacking layouts and styling here – no core code.

(I can’t believe I’m selling Purity but it’s a brilliant FREE template with so much work already done by the guys @Joomlart )

Back to the original question – we’ll steal not only some of the php from T3 Blank and apply it to Purity (the header block – just 45 lines of code) , we’ll nick the CSS too. Yes, we’ll have to test and check for conflicts and cock it up, scratch our heads, find the problem, correct it, have a beer etc, but that’s half of the fun of building a site no?! 🙂

As long as we do regular backups!! 😀

It’s your choice. Only you can decide what your site needs for the core functionality and layouts etc. If I can help you on your way I will.

Gruss

swissa

P.S. With regard to updates etc, we’ll make sure they don’t affect any files we make. They won’t be overwritten. Sicher.

[simes123 Friend simes123Join date: March 2014Posts: 5Downloads:0Uploads:0]

#527533

OK, you may have persuaded me. So I’m just playing around with Purity III and pulling what little hair I have out trying to figure out how some of it is put together. I’m probably missing something fundamental, but I cannot figure out where the content for the strip that appears directly under the menu bar comes from. Eg, if when viewing the site, and Choose Layout, Blog Layout, you see

“Purity III Blog

Joomla Tutorials, info, Discussions”

I’ve looked high and low and simply cannot find where that content comes from. Having spent 2 hours just trying to find that, I’m going nuts. Joomla just doesn’t seem to operate in the way I think it should – I don’t get it. I’ve tried ?tp=1 and that location shows no clues as to what position it is. It doesn’t appear on the not very wysiwig layout under Templates Admin for the Blog layout either. I get that pages are assigned to Menu items in Joomla, but why don’t articles give you a way to filter on articles associated with a menu item? (outside of the scope of Purity III I know). Or maybe they do?

If finding where the content associated with one of the Purity III layouts is this hard, there may not be too much advantage in me having these extra layouts if it takes me 2 hours to unsuccessfully reverse engineer where sample content has come from lol.

I’m sure it’s just me slipping back down the learning curve, but if you are able to shed any light about where I might find where the content for that part of the page comes from (so I might think about editing it), I’d be very grateful 🙂

Thanks for your help,

Much appreciated,

Simon

[swissa Friend swissaJoin date: November 2011Posts: 1955Downloads:7Uploads:277 Thanks: 175 Thanked: 717 times in 572 posts]

#527642

I don’t see this on mine or on the demo. Pls do a screenshot and post the url.

[simes123 Friend simes123Join date: March 2014Posts: 5Downloads:0Uploads:0]

#527673

I’ve found it – it was buried. If you go to Menu manager, choose Menu Items, then Layout/Blog, then the Page Display tab, you’ll see it as the last two parameters: Masshead Title and Masshead slogan. No wonder I couldn’t find it. Seems an illogical place to put page content to me, but then there is lots about Joomla that seem illogical to me 🙂 Still, at least I know where it is now. Seems to be some naming inconsistency going on (perhaps for good reason). I’m not sure why this block is called masShead, when masThead is used elsewhere. I’m sure this is documented somewhere 🙂

[Nazario A Friend Nazario AJoin date: April 2013Posts: 1183Downloads:0Uploads:406 Thanks: 91 Thanked: 284 times in 263 posts]

#527700

@ simes123,

Thanks for sharing the feedback on our userguide. I will pass this case to documentation team to review our guide again.

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