Having got our head around assigning Templates to different Joomla pages. And also looked at some very basic Joomla/Astroid Module functionality, it is time to role up our selves and finally take a closer look at some of the awesome capabilities of the Layout Section. As mentioned before, the Layout section is pretty much the heart of Astroid. And it is in turn divided up into Sections. In this tutorial we look at how these Sections are populated on a Section by Section basis.

Some of the Sections such as the Top Section draw on extra Astroid Framework functionality that can be found in the Astroid Frame Work. Examples being the Contact Details and Social Icons. Other Sections such as the Banner Section have extra Astroid Functionality that can be found as an extra Tab in the Joomla back end. Whilst strictly speaking the Banner is not active in the Two Template I think it is important to touch on this topic. Because integration like this as seamless as it is can be easy to miss! 

In the last part of this tutorial we take a peak at Widgets. Widgets are a great Astroid Feature and have recently  seen some major update . When I started this set of tutorials Widgets could only be applied to on an Astroid by Astroid Template basis. These days there is extra functionality where you can apply widgets to any Joomla page within any Astroid Template regardless of what pages it is assigned to! Any way in the interests of my sanity I am sticking to the now old fashioned method for the duration of these tutorials. Next up in this series a little more about widgets (the old fashioned way) and how they work with Template Two.” Find Out More About Astroid HERE.