In Joomla 3 there was a handy button to create a copy of template so that you had a basis on which to customise and create your own template.
This seems to have been removed in J5 and instead there is a create child template button which is not at all what I want. I want an entirely separate template to customise which is not linked to a parent.
What is the best way do do this now? (and why on earth was the facility removed - it was really useful) ?
In an effort to make maintenance of my sites easier to manage without creating problems for future upgrades, I copy the core template periodically and go through the process of renaming the files and code and then add my enhancements to make the template look, feel and act as I want it. This means when a new major release is dropped (or near dropped), I go through the process. I also keep a bit of an eye on GitHub changes relating to the template.
So for J5 I copied Cassiopeia files:
templates/cassiopeia Folder
media/templates/site/cassiopeia Folder
language/en-GB/tpl_cassiopeia.ini
language/en-GB/tpl_cassiopeia.sys.ini
Don't forget to rename all CSS files as appropriate.
there is a way to duplicate a template in Joomla 5. - Do the following:
I hope this helps...
This is not an answer but a long comment @Gerald
er, no. That is not what I want. All that does is make a duplicate of the template style settings in the template_styles table in the database. So you can have more than one set of style settings for a given template (default colours etc) for different parts of your site.
What I am after is the old J3 facility to create a copy of the actual template files and install it as a fresh template that you can then customise. It was quite handy for creating a copy of a template to modify that wouldn't get overwritten by updates.
The only way to do it now is manually by zipping up the template folder and the template's media folder and copying them to new folders with a new name and manually editing all of the references to the old template name so that the namespacing etc all works and doesn't get confused. Not so simple as it was in J3 which is probably why they couldn't be arsed to include it in J5.
Template copying is a old way for users to customize templates without losing changes. It has many issues. For example, it cannot rename PHP classes and language constants. Which eventually leads to conflicts. Furthermore, it's not really optimal because users have to maintain the whole template on their own. That's why it has been superseded by child templates. Although the implementation is poor, it does solve the mentioned issues because no files are copied. Users can override individual files and maintain only them.
Non-inheritable templates can still be copied but for modern templates you'd need to use an extension export extension or copy the files manually by inspecting the contents of templateDetails.xml manifest. Basically how you would copy any other extension.
I did try to create a child template but the appearance of my site changed when I loaded the next Joomla version.
I did copy the following files as suggested by Glenn but did not find which CSS files I should rename. I guess that I am missing something because I cannot view the duplicated template with a new name in the backend.
/templates/yourtemplatename/templateDetails.xml file to replace any references to cassipeia with yourtemplatename - specifically in the sections <name> <media destination= and the ``language filenames. No need to replace the language string names TPL_CASSIOPEIA unless you also change them in your new language files. (probably a good idea)
Discover entry under Extensions on the main menu (or dashboard if you are using the default dashboard rather than the better menu) so that the system finds and installs your new template. Thereafter you can edit the template files as you wish without system updates messing with them, but as Glenn suggested you need to watch for changes that should be implemented in your version.