Styling with Easy Layouts

If you are looking for a new project, a "drag'n'drop" tool to design different types of article layouts would be a brilliant addition to Template Creator CK.

Template Creator is very good in terms of the overall style and design but since Joomla introduced custom fields, I want to move away from 3rd party extensions and do everything within core Joomla (com_content). For instance I might want an article page for blogs and also an article page for directory items which has custom fields (opening times, Google Maps, etc).

However this is where Joomla falls completely flat on it's face because com_content just isn't designed to be customised and modified by anyone other than senior PHP, HTML and CSS developers (It's light years behind K2 in terms of customizability). Template Creator isn't bad in this respect as you can apply styles to basic things like titles, pagination and image but that's the limit and you can't create multiple styles for different categories.

I looked at EasyLayouts which initially really excited me but because Template Creator creates it's own styles classes, they are not compatible (perhaps not the correct term?).

I looked at EasyLayouts which initially really excited me but because Template Creator creates it's own styles classes, they are not compatible (perhaps not the correct term?).

I have never tested Easylayouts but I have good feedbacks about it
I don't really understand why Easylayouts could not work with Template Creator CK .Please give me some details about that point so that we can check

I understand your request but I don't plan to do that into Template Creator CK for now as this is really in the scope of the overrides

OK here are a couple of URLs to explain the issue.

This first URL is the article coded just using Template Creator
template-1.yorweb.co.uk/news/throwing-darts-in-lovers-eyes

Now here is the same article but additionally had EasyLayouts applied to the layout
template-1.yorweb.co.uk/features/throwing-darts-in-lovers-eyes

None of the Template Creator CSS is applied to the page to the EasyLayouts generated page. Individually both Template Creator and EasyLayouts are good but imagine the power it would give developers if you could design an article page (or anything else in com_content) in EasyLayouts then use Template Creator to style it "out of the box".

Now I am sure there is a way to apply Template Creator generated CSS to the page generated in EasyLayouts but it seems so convoluted that it is easier to simply edit the "article" php file directly and not use EasyLayouts. However (to me at least), the whole point of using Joomla in the first place is that you should be able to do stuff like this straight from Joomla's interface. If we have to start getting our hands dirty coding to this extent, we might as well ditch Joomla and look at Laravel. In my case I already have the HTML template (which I am trying to replicate in Template Creator) to kick things off.

Edit. I should add that this post is not a complaint about Template Creator (or EasyLayouts) but I think more born out of my own inabilities as a developer.

ok I see, thanks for the details
I don't know how works easylayouts, but I think that it uses a custom override, that is why the specific css of the template are no more applied
Template Creator CK uses also an override to put the css classes needed to style each part.

I understand your idea but there are 2 different tools, you must choose which one you want to use for your layout
I thought there was some styling options in Easy Layouts ...

Edit. I should add that this post is not a complaint about Template Creator (or EasyLayouts) but I think more born out of my own inabilities as a developer

I don't think that like a complaint, but more like an open discussion

Actually I would like to report some progress in the last 24 hours.

I went through default.php (the file for the article) and found Template Creator adds 3 classes (tck-article, tck-article-title and tck-article-body).

I then went into EasyLayouts, built a single article layout from blank/scratch and added a row where I had set the class to tck-article. I then nested 2 more rows inside that row and set tck-article-title and tck-article-body to the relevant content of that row and Template Creator generated styles were applied.

OK so this is not an "out of the box" solution but definitely a step in the right direction.

However before anyone gets too excited, I haven't tried applying Template Creator generated classes to anything other than single article in EasyLayouts at the moment.

yeah that is great
let me know about what you can achieve, this would be useful for other users too !
thank you