Halloween Joomla Template – The Making Of

View the Halloween Template Demo

Our Free Halloween Joomla Template is live and the official template page can be found at the previous link. There you will find links to download, source files, documentation of module positions, etc.

The demo site was designed around the idea of a simple Halloween costumes store. I didn’t really get time to flesh out the store with sample products so I hope you will just appreciate the overall aesthetic of the design and then put it to good use in your own projects.

Below is an image of my finished artwork in Adobe Fireworks – everything is on layers so elements can be switched out, edited, etc.

An example of how useful this can be is a quick hue/saturation filter I applied to the background layer, which gives us a really nice alternative effect:

The source files for this project are available to premium Joomlabear members in our downloads area.

I wanted to talk briefly about how I created the artwork and give credit where credit is due.

I’m very proud of the moon – this was created by cutting out an actual photo of a moon and then sitting it over the top of an orange gradient – I then changed the blend mode to Freeze to give a very orange Halloween look.

The font which I used for the logo, and which looks like dripping blood, or something right out of the Rocky Horror Picture Show is called Creepsville. It’s free for any use so you can grab this and make your own logos, etc.

The background was created using Photoshop, I took an image that  had a large amount of the night blue color in the template, and ran a Gaussian blur over it. I then used a number of excellent free photoshop cloud brushes from Qbrushes, and set them to black – overlaying these over my blue background.

The various Halloween icons, such as the Jack-O-Lantern, spider, cat, crow, bats and witch (you did spot the witch didn’t you?) were taken from an excellent Halloween Photoshop brush set from Obsidian Dawn. Love your work guys.

Hope you all enjoy the template! Leave a comment and let me know if you found this useful, and what projects you are using the template on.

How to Edit SEF URL’s in Joomla

This is a quick video showing how to customize your Joomla SEF URL’s (search engine friendly URL’s) using the Alias field in your Joomla article manager. It’s a really simple tip and at the end of the video I quickly explain how to activate your SEF URL’s if you have not done this already. I demonstrate the principal on our new healthy recipes site, And the design of this site will soon be released as a template here on Joomla Bear.
For people who are short on time I have included a quick summary below the video. And if you find the info useful you should subscribe to my feed as I make Joomla videos regularly.

In the Alias field for your Article enter the URL you would like to use, as seen below.

In the example screenshot above the URL will result in:

www.example.com/test-article

or,

www.example.com/test-article.html

The result depends on how you configure your SEF URL  setup in Joomla’s Global Configuration, and whether or not you use a 3rd part SEF extension like sh404SEF.

The built in Joomla SEF is fine as slong as you are not incredibly fussy about URL structure. It will insert the numbering into the URL.

On the healthy recipe website demo linked to above I have set my Global Configuration for SEF so it looks like this:

To use the Apache mod_rewrite option you will need to be running on a linux based host and you will also need to FTP into your Joomla site  root directory, and rename htaccess.txt to .htaccess if you have not done this already.

A final tip is that this also applies to Section and Category URL’s – you can edit the Alias field for each to customize.