Joomla Standards and Templating
For the past six to seven months we've been rebuilding the HWD component from the ground up. We took everything we knew from the legacy software and started over. Before we even laid a pixel of graphics or a line of code we had to establish some goals that would prove useful to our existing community and the development community of Joomla. That goal was to make HWD as flexible and usable as possible in the realm of Joomla.
To do this we needed to start with the administrator. We've designed the admin of the component to be as standard Joomla as possible. This meant that the various views in the admin would use standard Joomla output and styles. This gives the users a familiar environment if they've already used Joomla and gives new Joomla users a reference point. We've noticed with a lot of other component environments, that the presentation is different from the default Joomla admin. This causes confusion and if the user can feel comfortable in the interface then they will use it more often.
As a starting point, in the admin we've created a dashboard of icons that lets you reference any part of the component. We tried to mimic the Joomla dashboard as you can reference any part of your Joomla site from this view.
Each manager view is broken out into their own sections and is listed just like regular content, categories, etc... This give the users that familiar environment we were talking about.
The upload and configuration views are set up with slightly different layouts but elements on the pages aren't that outside of the Joomla norm so the user interface is familiar.
For the front end portion of the component are goals were literally the same thing. Make the front end views adhere to the Joomla standards as much as possible. This would present a seamless visualization of the component in any template that styles for Joomla standards. As a Joomla template developer I experience frustrations with components that use custom css styles, frameworks, and non-standard classes and IDs. This makes it difficult for a template dev, especially if the output is changed from version to version. The user updated his/her extensions and the template developer is forced to constantly update their templates.
To solve this problem our focus was to start with the standard Joomla output. What were the main classes and IDs being used in layouts and how could we use that information to control how each HWD view was displayed. How can template devs benefit from this and ultimately how would a user benefit?
We created each front end view with the template developer in mind. Make the output standard and the component should look great with little or no customization. This was a difficult task and brought up some other issues with Joomla so not every element could be standardized.
Most listing views use the standard Joomla blog layouts and the lists are using the category table list layouts. Buttons have a corresponding classes and forms use the standard output. This all helps to ensure a seamless environment between template and component. Hopefully we've done everything we can to ensure little or no customization for template using standard Joomla CSS styles.
