Packaging
Preparation
File Structure
The most basic files, such as index.php, error.php, templateDetails.xml,
template_thumbnail.png, favicon.ico should be placed directly in your template folder.
The most common is to place images, CSS files, JavaScript files etc in separate folders. Joomla! override files
must be placed in folders in the folder "html".
/{TemplateName}
/css
... CSS files ...
/html
... Overrides ...
/images
... Image files ...
/js
... JavaScript files ...
error.php
index.php
templateDetails.xml
template_thumbnail.png
favicon.ico
Thumbnail Preview Image
A thumbnail preview image named template_thumbnail should be included in your template. Image
size is 206 pixels in width and 150 pixels high. Recommended file format is PNG.
Packaging
Packaging a template for distribution is easy. Just "zip" up the module directory into a compressed archive file.
When the ZIP file is installed, the language file is copied to the appropriate language sub-directory of /language/ and
is loaded each time the template is loaded. All of the other files are copied to the /templates/{TemplateName} subfolder
of the HUB installation.
Note to Mac OS X users
The Finder's "compress" menu item produces a usable ZIP format package, but with one catch. It stores the files in AppleDouble format, adding extra files with names beginning with "._". Thus it adds a file named "._templateDetails.xml, which Joomla 1.5.x can sometimes misinterpret. The symptom is an error message, "XML Parsing Error at 1:1. Error 4: Empty document". The workaround is to compress from the command line, and set a shell environment variable "COPYFILE_DISABLE" to "true" before using "compress" or "tar". See the AppleDouble article for more information.
To set an environment variable on a Mac, open a terminal window and type:
export COPYFILE_DISABLE=true
Then in the same terminal window, change directories into where your template files reside and issue the zip command. For instance, if your template files have been built in a folder in your personal directory called myTemplate, then you would do the following:
cd myTemplate zip -r myTemplate.zip *