iris lines designs

On a site using the Joomla Bamboo template Pure, I was having trouble with footer not clearing the sidebar.  I discovered that a custom html module with just a non-breaking space in the bottom position would fix the problem.  I didn't mind the dark banner that stretched across the screen and I was willing to live with this work around  (having tried all kinds of clears, etc. on the footer module.)

Then I discovered that that "fix"  didn't fix it in PC browsers:  Firefox and IE8.   Consulting the joomla bamboo forum I found a similar issue with a suggestion to be sure images had explicit heights.   I added heights to my flickr and facebook modules and the problem was solved.   The PC browsers were apparently not reading the heights declared for the iframes used by these modules.    And the template seemed to need to calculate a total height for the sidebar.

I've uploaded my PPT presentation "What's New in Templates with Joomla! 1.6"  as a .pdf file.

I've also uploaded a .txt file of all of the snippets for a basic template. 

My puzzle was that my alternative layout for a category blog would not show up as a choice in the category manager.

I turned to the Joomla Forum  and found that others had posted about their alternative layouts not being implemented, even when they chose them for a particular category.

Here's what I posted in reply:

Using conditional statements you can control whether your template creates a div and module position for a left or right sidebar depending on whether a module exists for any given page.   But this does not cause the content to stretch to fill that available space when no sidebar modules are present.

It IS possible to use conditional statements in the opening php block of your template to set values of variables which are then used in the template to create divs with different classes depending on the modules present.

For this example I'm using a liquid design with a left column width of 20%, and a right column width of 30%.   Left and center columns are floated left, right column is floated right. Two background images are used to create the faux columns. The content area will be either 50%, 70%, 80% or 100% depending on the presence of modules for the left or right columns.

I add these 4 lines to the opening php block:
if($this->countModules('left + right') > 0) $layout="50";
if($this->countModules('right') <= 0) $layout="80";
if($this->countModules('left') <= 0) $layout="70";
if($this->countModules('left + right') <= 0) $layout="100";

and in my html I reference that variable wherever needed like this: