As I posted in “About my Website“, my current  Denver real estate website is built on the Rocket Themes Affinity template for Joomla 1.5, released in July 2009.  In this article, I will explain some of the criteria I used for choosing a template, some of the issues I faced in the evaluation process, and some of the fatal issues with other templates, including many other templates from Rocket Themes, that caused me to reject them.

Template Selection Criteria

In evaluating the many available Joomla templates for my new real estate website, there were several high priority goals and requirements:

• The template had to work flawlessly, or nearly so, with my current real estate oriented content, especially with the  Ultimate IDX integrated IDX. Minor rendering issues would be tolerated, if they could be fixed easily. But anything that would require major hacks to the template code would eliminate that template as a candidate.
• The template’s Joomla Admin configuration functions needed to support user specified main panel and side panel widths without hard-coded template hacks.
• The template had to have robust multilevel horizontal top menu support built in, including MooMenu or equivalent drop-down menus. It also had to be capable of supporting my custom version of the SuperFish vertical menu in the left pane.
• The template needed to have at least 5-6 pre-configured color schemes, so it could be offered as a standard template “package” to other brokers/agents in our office who may not like my particular color choices. Future expandability in this area was also a consideration, but not necessary a “must have”.
• The template needed to have strong vendor support, including a template specific support forum and community of active template users. This eliminated the majority of the free templates.
• The template needed to support many possible module types and positions, including modules above and below the main content pane, and a choice of left or right side modules or both.

Evaluation Methodology

With many of the templates that were considered and eliminated early in the process, it was pretty easy to eliminate those with weak vendor support and/or limited module positions and functionality.  However, when it got down to evaluating compatibility factors and menu functionality, there was no other option but to implement and test each candidate, using a standard test content page in a dedicated development / test environment.

The first task was to build the standard test content page with as many of my own special content blocks as I could, especially the IDX content and certain special styles that I use frequently. Once I had the standard test content page built, I cloned it several times, and applied each remaining candidate template to one of the test content page clones. This allowed me to view and compare how each template handled that content. Each test page also had one of my more complex SuperFish left panel menus attached to it so that I could see how well the two behaved with each other.

Evaluation Testing Results

Based on the initial test results, 5 of the candidate templates were immediately eliminated due to content rendering issues, primarily that they either truncated wide main panel content instead of wrapping it properly, or they displayed wide main panel content over the right pane instead of wrapping it.  Another 3 candidates were eliminated because thir main pane content would not allow my SuperFish left pane menus to be displayed properly, generally as a result of z-index and/or transparency conflicts. While all of these rendering issues could probably have been fixed by various template hacks, why should I have to deal with that when several of the remaining templates handled everything properly and without complaint?

The Winner: RT/Affinity

Of the remaining templates that functioned well with all of my test page content and menus, I selected the RT/Affinity template for its many pre-configured style/color options, and based my personal likes and dislikes about the many available module positions that all of the remaining candidates supported.

However, even this template had a few minor problems that needed to be fixed:

• Poll module bottom buttons were not properly positioned in IE. A minor hack of the IE specific css easily fixed this.
• The User1-User3 modules, located at the top of the page, were not properly rendered in IE. Another minor template hack seems to have fixed this, but the issue also keeps coming back at times, despite my fix, so I still need to figure out what is happening.
• Menu Dividers are not handled like I would like. However, this seems to be a design choice that the RT developers have made intentionally, so I can live with it.
• While my SuperFish menu code generally worked, proper and complete SuperFish left panel menu fold-out integration required more time and template css hacks than I had planned for, but the end result was very good, at least in my opinion.
• The SuperFish css structure has issues adapting well to multiple template css colors and styles, and I still need to work out how to best handle this. However, this is really a SuperFish issue, not with Affinity or any other RT template.

Now that these relatively minor issues are fixed, and everything functions well on my  production website, building another Affinity based real estate website for other brokers and agents should be a much easier and quicker process, one that I hope to repeat many times for my REALTOR consulting clients.