I've started playing around with Artisteer, the automated web site template design software, for the simple reason that stock templates, whether they are free or not, eventually get overused. I belong to a number of template clubs but even their template tend to have a sameness to them.

I am looking at Artisteer because I want to be able to create unique web site templates for my clients and I must say that I am impressed with how powerful and user-friendly this program is.

No more run-of-of-the-mill stock Joomla! templates or paying a fortune for custom Joomla! templates.

I came across this great source for Joomla 1.5 templates. Membership gives you access to more than 300 professional Joomla templates.

All the web designs are compatible with the latest version of Joomla

Each template zip file package includes the following files.

1. Template zip file contains the CSS, XML, PHP and JPEG, PNG, GIF image files
2. Installation guide
3. Photoshop file

Joomla club templates & free templates

Shape 5 Template Club is not only about professionally designed niche market templates. They offer a number of great extensions to both free and paid members to enhance your Joomla! web site.

These are just some of their extensions:

• S5 Tab Show - This module enables you to add tabs to any Joomla! web site. The tabs are similar to those use at the top of this page, just below the top menu and allows you to promote areas of your web site, affiliate programmes, Google Adsense, et. on your pages without cluttering up the page.
• S5 VirtueMart Accordion Menu - The S5 Virtuemart Accordion menu module will display categories up to 3 levels deep. Version 2 now uses our own S5 Effects and no mootools, this means no script conflictions with your other modules! This module can be used with any template running Virtuemart and allows an admin to change items like: font colors, font sizes, background colors, border styles, etc.
• S5 Photo Expression - Great for photo sites! This module gives you the ability to show up to 150 photos and 5 modules of your choice plus it comes packed with tons of other features such as setting your own sizes, colors and margins, set hyperlinks to the display window, auto scrollbar for thumbnails, etc.
• S5 Domain Checker - Ideal for web hosting and web design sites. The S5 Domain Checker module is a free module that you can add to any Joomla site. This module provides your customers a quick and easy way to see if a domain is available to be purchased or if someone else already owns the domain.

Joomla! has released the new version of Joomla! CMS, 1.6 Alpha (this means it is for testing and not to be used on your live web sites).

Just when we started getting used to Joomla! 1.5. However, as with anything else, our CMS must keep up with developments and as Joomla! 1.5 is a major improvement over the older version, so 1.6 (once the stable version is released) should also be an improvement.

We often need to embed code like javascript, forms, paypal buttons, etc. into our web pages and it can create a problem.

I came across this great little component called RawContent to do the job easily.

Install the component. module and two plugins and publish them. The one plug in is a button that shows below your editor to easily select the raw content you want to insert.