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Both options are good, standard templates or one joomla template. Think about semantic html and accessibility for joomla templates.

Currently Joomla 2.5 comes with 2 templates. So is Joomla 3.0 going to only come with 1? If not, why not have the approach of having a default template (clean and neat) and a blank template (with blank styling for the classes and ids).

Technically, Joomla 2.5 comes with 3 templates in front, and 2 in the back. There are also the two system templates which aren't fully functional, but could be used.

Since 3.0 is likely to use Bootstrap, that means a pretty standard base.

I intend to use a very minimal template like www.kyleledbetter.com/j3ux/site/index.html for Joomla 3.0 that minimally styles Bootstrap and the content and is super simple to customize for folks that use it for a boilerplate. Angie is also working on a Bootstrap version of her Beez template for 3.0

This sounds great guys - and love how your sample frontend is coming along too Kyle.

I think it's time to download from Git and start playing... thanks for your efforts.

I have a dream, that one day, Joomla comes with one template, one css (head), one javascript (body bottom) and overrides for bootstrap in html5 and no mootools, no other scripts, only if an extension need it... Wait... this is the philosophy of Blank Template.

But something like this should not the default template of Joomla. Web Design should be updated by Web Designer and not the CMS. So, square1 make it right: one small system template as fallback, nothing more. I love it.

I have a similar dream, though mine is focussed primarily on usability, user experince extreme speed and ultra-lean semantic markup.

My previous version of OneWeb contained almost no styling at all, to encourage designers to layer on their own without the distraction of my design already on the canvas, but found that the general user cannot see past that and envisage their own design so easily.

Hence, my revised OneWeb v2 (which has been re-written from scratch) does have a clean, minimal design style. I *hope* that users can still envisage implementing their design on top (though I think I may see many just use it as is!).

I haven't sacrificed the lean+clean ideal to achieve this though, in fact I have pushed it harder than ever before.

My demo site at joomlafuture.com weighs at just 114.3Kb without any compression or minification (earning a perfect 100/100 score when I just tested at tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ ). That's including the banner image (not included in the template) at 54Kb and and 44.4Kb of (entirely optional and not present by default) webfonts. Yep, that's under 20Kb for a front-page layout with 2 article intros and 14 modules. It isn't hard to slim it down even further than this, though I wanted to keep my code readable to act as a teaching tool.

Of course, it's mobile first, responsive and functions properly with .js disabled (a particular bugbear of mine).

Personally, I would like to see the loading of *every* asset be made optional giving control back to the designer and users and no .js dependancies anywhere. It's hard to see how a oneweb (the W3C meaning) dream can be reached without that level of control or concern about page-weight. (*just my $0.02, take it or leave it*)


Seth

I would be happy to help in trying to create a lightweight front-end template, based on Bootstrap, that is usable and accessible without Javascript.

Future-proofing FTW!