WordPress and Joomla! Templates

Templates such as the ones you get with a blogging program like WordPress or a CMS like Joomla or Drupal, use the extension .php because they use PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) programming.

Although you can create PHP pages and templates in Dreamweaver, these types of templates you need for WordPress or Joomla are far more complex to create than .dwt Dreamweaver templates.

Because so many people use WordPress and Joomla, many sites offer free templates you can download to use on your blog. Many people charge a fee for templates and the best ones aren't free.

You can edit WordPress and Joomla templates in Dreamweaver, but before you start, you should learn how Dreamweaver differs from WordPress and Joomla to appreciate how templates differ among programs such as WordPress, Flash, Dreamweaver and others.

But it's easy to get confused about why WordPress and Joomla templates don’t work in Dreamweaver the way .dwt Dreamweaver templates work.

WordPress templates offer many of the same benefits as Dreamweaver templates -- except that templates for blogs like WordPress draw their content from a database. As a result, they include XHTML and CSS like the Dreamweaver Templates, plus much more complicated code in the PHP programming language.

Although creating a basic blog with a WordPress template is easy, editing a WordPress template is not so easy. Because that underlying technology is so complicated, changing the fonts, colors, columns in a page layout, and so on is also complicated.

The gardening Web site www.GardenstoTables.com was created with a program called Joomla! (I don't always use it, but the official name of Joomla includes an exclamation point!). Similar to WordPress, Joomla! offers many types of templates and add-ons to make creating a dynamic Web site easier (learn more about the advantages of creating a dynamic web site in Joomla or WordPress).

Content Management Systems and blogging tools are ideal if you plan to create a large, complex site, especially one that you expect to grow into hundreds, or thousands of pages, over time.

But remember, you can always start your site as a static site in Dreamweaver and then graduate to a more complicated way of building a site, such as Joomla!, as your site grows.