Customizing MC templates and layouts

Music Collection is fully Joomla! 1.5 native, wich, among other things, means a strong separation between programmation logic and template design. Music Collection provides some parameters to customize what items and elements you want to display in the frontend. However, if you want to get a highest customization fo your templates, you can do it easily (if you have basic knowledge on HTML and CSS)

The main (HTML) structure of the layouts (we call layouts those template files that provide us the view from certain elements: Artist layout (displays artist info), Album layout, Song layout...) are located on the folder "views" of com_muscol installation

For instance, we'll find the default template for the Album view on the file

components/com_muscol/views/album/tmpl/default.php

or we'll find the detailed artist view on

components/com_muscol/views/artist/tmpl/detailed.php

So, to modify the way MC displays information, you just have to modify the file containing this template. This is a PHP file, because there's some PHP code to print the data, but the main structure is HTML. So all you have to do is change the HTML code to whatever you want it to be. In addition, even if you're not quite familiar to PHP, the PHP tags that print the (album, artist, song) data is quite understandable.

For instance, on the default album view (views/album/default.php), we'll find PHP sentences such as

$this->album->name; 

wich prints the album name, or

$this->album->review;

wich prints the album review.

The other main tool to change the layouts (and the first one you should consider to use) is CSS properties. CSS files are located in assets/ folder.

Using this CSS properties you'll be able to modify a lot of parameters that can make your MC installation look different and unique, and appropiate to your site design's