What is a Joomla! template?

Joomla! templates are a special type of extension on a Joomla! website. They control the design of your website, and you can think of them as a real-world extension of the Model-View-Controller pattern. Templates should only affect the design of your website.

In Joomla!, we use templates for the backend and frontend to change the design of both parts of a site. With Joomla!, besides the default backend template, some other backend templates appear, but it’s not very common to use a different backend template. In any case, the principles under which templates operate are the same for both the backend and frontend.

Backend templates are inside the /administrator/templates of your Joomla! site. When you check inside that folder, you will see the atum folder, which contains all the files and folders for the default Joomla! backend template.

Frontend templates live in the /templates folder of your site, and in a clean Joomla! installation, you...