Overrides, everyone! (Part 1) – Free YOOtheme template overrides for Joomla 1.5

Hi everybody! With our latest template release Way Beyond we started to deliver overrides for Joomla's core output! This means that now not only the layout of our templates is tableless but also the core components which Joomla usually renders as tables. We restructured the whole HTML output. Now it is semantic and easily styleable with CSS. We also deliver a single, cleaned up CSS file which styles our overrides. One of the most important changes is the way we use the page class suffix. It is no longer attached to the existing CSS classes, which was a nightmare for web designers. Instead, we now use the page class suffix as an additional CSS class in a container which is wrapped around the core output. This is awesome for web designers because this way you can override existing CSS styles for specific pages very conveniently. Also, our CSS styles only apply to our overrides and will not affect any other HTML code. You should take a look at it yourself :-)

We think that we all would love Joomla to come with cleaned-up, tableless core components. That's why we contribute our overrides to the Joomla community. You can use these overrides for all YOOtheme templates we developed before 2009 and of course also for all templates you develop yourself. We focused on semantic, structured and easily styleable HTML output which makes our overrides a very good base to develop your own overrides. We know that many other template providers already started to use Joomla overrides, too, so you have to make sure that you do not delete any existing overrides when you add ours to a third-party template.

We would be more than happy if you got involved in this, too, and it would be amazing if you commented this post to give us feedback and tell us your ideas on how to improve our overrides. The whole core output/template overrides issue regards us all - every developer who has ever set up a Joomla site knows about the output issue. Maybe our overrides could become a basis for everyone's template development.

So let's get this started, download our overrides and improve the overall quality of your website.

In the next post on this topic we will explain the most important improvements in more detail. So keep checking back!