I'm in the process of setting up a new website for the church I attended when I was in high school (boy, what that a long time ago!).  Since we had decided to set it up on Joomla 1.5, I thought I'd document the process of setting up the site step by step.

I set up the site using the "Fantastico" auto-installer that comes with my webhost so I had a "Default" joomla installation.

The first thing I wanted to do is to install a template.  I had already customized a template for the church for a 1.0.15 site, so this was pretty easy to do.   The template I wanted to use was not a Joomla 1.5 native template, but it did work just fine in "Legacy Mode" so my first step was to turn on the "Legacy Mode" for the new site.

Turning on Legacy Mode

"Legacy Mode" is actually implmented using a Joomla plug-in called (gues what) "Legacy Mode."   So,  I logged in to my administratie control panel and went to the "Extensions" menu and chose "plug in manager."

Next, look for the "System-Legacy" plug in.  On a new Joomla install, it is item 25 (on page 2).  Once you find the plug in. click on the "Enable / Disable" icon to turn it "on."

Doing this will make a great difference in enabling your Joomla 1.5 site to work with older Joomla extensions and templates.  The compatibility is not perfect, but it is very, very good.

Members of the core team say that there is almost no performance penalty for doing this as they have optimized the code carefully for this purpose.

So, this is very helpful when moving an existing 1.0.x site to a 1.5 site.

Installing the Template

Now that I have the legacy mode turned on, I can install my older template.

The template I am using is called "alpha2006" and was designed by Pasquale Zullo of the now-defunct Web Revolution template club.  Pasquale put out some beautiful templates while he was with Web Revolution before he left to work on another venture.  A few months later, Web Revolution went out of business rather abruptly, which was unfortunate, as they had some very nice templates (which I still use on many sites).

So, let's install the template.

Templates (in Joomla 1.5) are installed as any other extension, using the "Extensions / Install" menu.

Once in the installer, click <Browse> to locate the file you want to install.  In this case, the template install file comes as a .gtz compressed archive file.

Once you have located the file, click <Upload File and Install> to complete the installation.

It will take a few moments for the file to upload and for Joomla to install it.  If successful, you will see this message:

The template is now installed.  But, it is not yet the "active" or "default" template.   To make this new template the "default" template, you need to go to the Template Manager.

Here you see a list of the installed templates.  To make a template the "default" template, click the button in front of the template name, then click the  <Default> button.

Once you have done that, Joomla will make this new template the "default" template, and the template list will look like this:

That's it.  The next time you go to the site, your newly loaded template will be the template you see.

However, you are not done yet.

Different templates handle module positions differently, so things may or may not appear the way you want them to.

That leads to the next step in setting up a new site with a new template ... customizing the module positions.

I'll do that next.