To this point, we've done all of our work here in the back-end of Joomla
with the default template that Joomla ships with.
This is the isis template in Joomla! 3,
and this is the sort of the blue on the top, and the white in the layouts that you see here.
But just like all Joomla
Web sites, you can change the template on the front-end. You can also change the
template on the Administrator side of things here in the back-end.
And you can go to third-party providers, and you can download different admin
templates for Joomla! 3, but Joomla! 3
itself also ships with two admin templates:
isis, this one by default, and there is a second one called Hathor.
You may have heard of Hathor before, because it was available also in Joomla! 1.6, 1.7, and 2.5.
So I would like to give you a little tour of the Hathor template now.
If we go to Extensions > Template Manager, right now we have available to us two
admin templates: that's isis, and Hathor here.
What I'm going to do is I'm just going to click on the star here for Hathor, and
set this as the default template.
This completely changes the look of the back-end here.
So why does Joomla
have two admin templates?
Well, this particular template, Hathor, was built by my good friend Andy Tarr, who
was a Google Summer of Code intern and the summer of 2009, and she wound up
working on Hathor as her project, and what she wanted to create was a fully
accessible administrator template.
And this template is WCAG level 2 compliant template, meaning that it's great
for people who have various kinds of disabilities, both visual disabilities, and
motor disabilities. You can navigate this entire admin template using a keyboard only.
So as you see, it looks fairly different, but you still have many of the things
you have come to know and love.
Here is your control panel.
You still have dropdowns here, and the location of all of the items that we've
been working with here in Joomla
are all still in the same places.
If you take a look at something like the Article Manager, which we've looked at
lot, this stretches all the way across the screen, and actually this display is
much more similar to what we saw in Joomla! 2.5
than it is to the 3.0 layouts.
We have our Filters that were on the left side of the screen in the isis
template are going across the top here in the Hathor template, and here are the
buttons for creating new items.
There's no big green New button. The New button is still here,
it's still on the left, but it looks very much like the other buttons.
There are a few ways you can customize the Hathor template.
Again, these customizations are targeted to people who have various kinds of disabilities.
So if I click on the style for the Hathor template, I can notably change things,
like the color for this template.
Some people with various kinds of visual disabilities see better with a dark
background with light text on top of it.
So the high contrast template, if I just choose that, and say Save, will give you
that bright contrast that some people with various types of disabilities require
in order to be able to read the screen more easily.
There's also some other color combinations here.
There's a brown that's available, and there is also a blue that's available,
and these are tailored to various types of disabilities.
You can make all of the text bold; that may be helpful, again, for some types of
disabilities, or you can leave it all just at normal font weight as well.
You also the ability to change the Site name and the logo if you wish using that
particular interface.
So that's a real quick overview of what Hathor is, and why it's here.
And the last thing that I'd like to tell you is, Hathor might be useful if you're
working with a team of people who are working on a Joomla
Web site, and maybe somebody needs the Hathor template in order to get around in the back-end.
But you don't have to require everyone to use the Hathor template.
So what you can do is you can assign administrator templates on a user by user
basis, which is incredibly helpful.
I'm speaking specifically here to the case of disabilities, but even if you want
to work with a certain admin template yourself as a site developer, and you want
to have a different template available for your clients, that's completely
possible inside of Joomla! 3.
So let me just show you that really quickly.
I'm going to hit Close here to get out of that particular screen.
I'm going to reset isis as my default template by clicking on the star here.
Under Users, under User Manager, and if you click on Super User, which is our only
user at this point in time, we do have the ability to assign administrator
templates here within these particular settings.
So under the Basic Settings tab, here with the back-end template style, I can
override the default for the entire Web site.
So by default, as I make new users, everybody is using the isis template, but I
could make exceptions for certain users, and through this interface, if I set
Hathor, then just for this particular login, they would see Hathor, while everybody
else is seeing the isis template.
So that's a very helpful addition to Joomla! 3,
and it means that everybody can work with the administrator template that they
are most comfortable, and most productive using.