New Local Media's nice, new look under Joomla 1.5 mainly has to do with the template I've appropriated and updated to work with the latest Joomla release. (With a few other enhancements.) It's the mysterious Axel Wehner's strangely obscure "68 Portal," a finalist (top 5) in the Joomla 1.5 template contest for 2007.

The undeservedly forgotten Portal should have won that contest. It was the best and most unique looking entry. None of the others were, like Wehner's template, 100% semantically valid and fully tableless--meaning the primary Joomla core and major extension output (full of tables used for layout) is overridden by the template. (Still not every last extension has an override in 68portal, and I am not aware of a single template to date that does provide semantic, tableless overrides for every Joomla extension in the core distribution.)

Lean, fast loading, high quality work like Portal has taken two years to really begin to get rolling as the norm in the commercial Joomla templating community as 1.5's MVC architecture and template overrides slowly sink in. Probably the two best known Joomla template "clubs," JoomlaArt and RocketTheme, have only just adopted truly tableless design as their standard, perhaps under competitive pressure from newcomers in the Joomla market, like JoomlaPraise. I think JoomlaShack is on board now too. (Updated: Yes, they are.)

Like Drupal but unlike Wordpress, you have to pay for quality Joomla template design as there are very few free options that are truly first rate. You'd think someone would have ported Grid Focus or Morning After from Wordpress to Joomla. (You can get both for Drupal.) You'd think more people would be using 68 Portal.

Maybe this doesn't happen because the cost of buying a Joomla template is negligible (for Drupal it's often much, much higher), but among the commercial options, a lot of templates that look good aren't really built that well. They are, in a word, "cheap." A quick cure for this would be some really good, usable, free Joomla templates that raise the bar for everyone, including the commercial template vendors.

I suspect a large part of the reason for the lack of high quality templates and the slow rate of adoption of standards compliant, semantically valid design in the Joomla community stems from the fact that Joomla 1.5 was released with only one fully tableless template (Beez) which had its own site and tutorial to explain the new way of doing things.

As a concept demonstration, and from a purely technical standpoint, Beez is great. But most users probably--like me--ignored Beez at the time, because they were busy with Joomla 1.0 sites and extensions that needed to be migrated to 1.5. At first glance, Beez seems unusable for creating any kind of site you'd actually put into production. Girly colors, too much trouble hacking away the silly bee graphics--better to just ignore it and start from the JoomlaArt or RocketTheme options which were pretty much "business as usual," table-rich templates.

I bet there would be better design and higher expectations for templates among Joomla users today if 68 Portal had been included in the core Joomla distribution. On the Big 3, I am partial to the view expressed by a commenter at Smashing Magazine:

Graphic designers should seriously consider Joomla over both Wordpress and Drupal. Joomla has a much better templating system than Wordpress once you get to know it. To do a site that’s more than a blog is possible in WP, but slightly masochistic once you’ve tried Joomla. As for Drupal, it’s a great system for a serious PHP developer…but the back end is a lot less friendly for your clients than either Joomla or Wordpress. I’d say Drupal for large corporate sites, WP for blogs and Joomla for just about everything else.

I may be underestimating the extent to which heavy, cluttered, inefficient, eye-candy laden Joomla template + extensions packages are favored by a large group of people who want to use them relatively unaltered to rapidly create websites that look like the demo at the template clubs. But even if it's a minority, the people who extensively modify and build their own templates would be better served by having some prominent models like 68 Portal.

When I get a chance to put together a public-ready version of it, I'll put my updated Portal in the download directory. At this point int time, I don't think any of the available versions will fully work with the latest release of Joomla. The updates needed are scattered around the Joomla forum. Search for "68 Portal" and "68portal."