Hi,

Im new to Joomla. Great product. I thought to speed things up while im learning as i dont have a huge amount of time atm to build my own personal website and learn joomla at the same time so i thought Id purchase Artisteer v2.4 and create a template and go from here.

Ive noticed some some things with the product thou from earlier post an dstuff ive read on the net sych as:

* cannot edit content atm
* when loading template into joomla it appears to be not that easy to edit and the code generated doesnt conform to standards
* cannot load existing templates found on the net into Artisteer for some custom editing

Its the second one above that concerns me ...
Is it still a problem? and any other concerns?

How do people find Artisteer? I like the idea of the product and it looks good .. wish it did editing but they plan to include this in a future release.

Cheers,
John

I recently put a commercial template on a clients site but found the font size too large in the main menu so adjusted the css to give a better look. This mod caused a problem with sub-menus that the menu designers couldn't suggest a fixed after numerous emails and 2 weeks of time.
I gave up and reproduced the look of the template in Artisteer in a short time (less than tweaking the original CSS).
In Artisteer you still need to tweak the css to get the look you want but once you know how it works it's not hard.
This is my main site (still evolving) made with Artisteer - yws.com.au.
For a fix width template without the bells and whistles - Artisteer is a good investment.

I like your website and like the fast turnaround that you produced!

Did you find Artisteer generated the standard output and not cryptic that is then hard to edit manually in Joomla?

If you look at the site spat out by Artisteer with YCS's site, you'll notice the code doesn't conform to standards.

Like any other automated, non-thinking, mass production tool, it generates what it wants without thinking about quality.

I bought, I played, I buried on hard drive. Didn't like the code. Easier to use proper commercial templates and Firebug to edit changes.

Cheers,

Ric

I agree.
I (ambitiously) used Artisteer to create a template from a custom graphic design, but the code it produced was so verbose and completely non-standard that I could have coded a fresh template from scratch in much less time than it took me to edit/debug.

Having said that, coding a template using just its parameters did seem to produce a browser-resistant result.

The bottom line is, it doesn't use Joomla standard styles, so even if the base template works, extensions are always going to cause problems.

However, I should note that this test was quite a while ago (Jul 09), and they may now have changed their template construction method. Can anyone tell me?

thx
Dex