When I first discovered Joomla! when it was still Mambo, my first question was: "How the heck am I going to edit the template?"

I think this is pretty much the first question any traditional web designer has when they first try to work with a CMS. It's natural. We are used to a Top down style of designing the page and then inserting the content, Joomla is the opposite. The content is there, but the design, even the excellently designed Ruck Solarflare, is the first thing we must change if we want to make an original website. 

I came up with two distinctive systems for dealing with Joomla templates, one uses the excellent Firefox Web Developer plug in and the other is a more traditional approach using Macromedia Dreamweaver as a css editor. Both assume that the web designer reading this article is interested in having some sort of visual feedback when editing CSS files.

This article is about using Firefox and how it can be edit many aspects of a Joomla template. Using the Firefox Web Developer extension is, to me, a bit more laborious and confusing than using Dreamweaver, but it is more immediate and less convoluted at times. Let's get going.