TechRecipes

Templates decides the look and feel of a Joomla site. A template typically consist of some HTML, PHP, CSS, XML, Javascript and image files and directories.

There are few ways to install a Joomla template, but this post will only discuss one method, which is to install from a zip packaged template file stored in our local computer.

The first step is to download the template package file to our local machine. While many Joomla templates are available for free over the Internet, some premium templates are not. The sites http://www.siteground.com/joomla-hosting/joomla-templates.htm and http://www.joomla24.com/ provide thousands of free Joomla templates for us to choose from. Download one from these sites if you don’t have any.

To start with the installation, login to the administration panel of our Joomla site. Once there, go to the Extensions -> Install/Uninstall menu.

We’ll come to the Extension Manager page, and here we’ll need to specify the path of our downloaded template file in the Package file text field.

Rather than typing the path manually, simply click the Browse button, and a file chooser window should appear, and we can just select our template file from here.

Once done, click the Upload File & Install button and that’s just it. To configure the site to use our newly installed template, follow the following link.

The previous steps assume we’ll come to no error in the process. There are few possible error however, such as improperly packaged or corrupted template file, and write permission error on the server.

Installing a Joomla template requires two directory to be writeable by the web server. We’ll probably get any if not both of these errors;

1. Warning! Failed to move file.
2. JFolder::create: Could not create directory; Template Install: Failed to create directory. "<Joomla templates directory>"

They are caused by write permission problem on the folder tmp and templates  in the Joomla installation directory.

To fix it, just enable write permission on the directories, and in Linux, these commands would help;

# cd <Joomla installation directory>
# chmod a+w tmp templates