Joomla Template Tutorial - Changing File Permissions

There may be times when you wish to edit your Joomla template files and this can be done either from within Joomla itself or by editing the file on your computer. For this example let's imagine we want to edit the template.css file of the beez template that comes with Joomla.

Editing Joomla Templates from within Joomla:

Login to your Administrator area of Joomla

The Control Panel will display

Select Extensions/Template Manager from the Menu bar

The Template Manager will display

Select the Template you wish to edit i.e beez

The Template Edit page will display

Let's imagine you wish to edit the template.css file

Select Edit.css

The Template CSS Editor page will display listing all the css files that are associated with your Joomla web site

Notice that in most cases all the files will be unwritable.

To edit these files you will need to change the permissions so that you can change the coding

This is where it becomes a little more complicated especially if you are not familiar with FTP

You will need an FTP application to change the permissions such as Filezilla (http://wiki.filezilla-project.org/Main_Page) or you could download a 30 day trial of Dreamweaver

Whichever program you choose, login to your server where you will see a list of files for your joomla site

Navigate to the Template folder and then to the folder of the template you wish to edit. For this example let's use beez

Select the beez folder and you will see a folder called css

Select the css folder and you will see the template.css

If you are using Dreamweaver, right click on the template.css

The Microsoft Windows pop up window will display and you will see an option called Set Permissions

For other applications you will need to read the manual

Select the Set Permissions option

The File Access Properties window will display and you will see that the file is set to 755 in other words it can be read and executed by everyone but not edited except for the owner of the file

Change the permission to 777 which will give everyone access to read, write and execute the file

Be aware that this file is now vulnerable so you want to change it back as soon as you can to 755

Open up your Template Edit Page in Joomla

You may need to refresh the page and you will now see that your template.css file is writeable

Select template.css and click the edit button

The Template Manager page will display and you can make your changes

Click the Save button when you have completed your changes

Check that your changes have been reflected in your site

You may need to close the browser and open it again for you to be able to see the changes

Go back to your FTP application and set the permissions back to 755 so that your file cannot be written to

The second way of editing your template.css file is to download the file to your computer:

Using the FTP application login to your server

Navigate to the Template folder and then to the folder of the template you wish to edit. For this example let's use beez

Select the beez folder and you will see a folder called css

Select the css folder and you will see the template.css

Download the file to your computer

In Dreamweaver you can simply double click on the file

You won't have to worry about permissions

I suggest you make a copy of this file incase you make a mistake so call it something like templateBACKUP.css

Open the file and make your amendments

Upload the file back to the original folder. This will overwrite the original file

Refresh your browser and see your amendments

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