Have you just landed a developer job and there are many strange, new things for you to learn about templates development? Because IT is such a large world with a huge amount of things for you to discover, that can makes you feel bewildered at the beginning. From their experiences in building Joomla templates, the JoomlaShine Team will introduce to you a collection of useful web development tools that help front-end developers create magnificent websites.

For each phase of templates development, there are 3 kinds of tools as bellow:

• Graphic software to edit, slice design file to the individual image layers
• Editor software for writing your template code from scratch and customize them
• Debug & Test tools to customize, debug and test the websites, and to validate against web standards

Graphics Editors

When you develop Joomla templates, it does not need a lot of knowledge about web design but some basic skill is necessary for editing and slicing the layer design.

I have used Photoshop for image slicing for a long time, until I felt it was too heavy, slow and expensive for only pixel handling. That is not enough for templates development since the design files can be bitmaps or vector graphics, and often very large. I tried a different approach and realized it is a better choice than ever.

Adobe Fireworks