Painless Joomla Template

If you've worked with Joomla templates, I'm sure you know the frustration of trying to wrestle them to match your design vision. Most templates (even those marketed as "blank"), come loaded with opinionated styles and structure that you end up fighting against. I faced this daily at Jarbo until I decided to build something better: newtralize

How do we newtralize Joomla?

Truly blank foundation

The template outputs nearly raw HTML with minimal CSS—just enough universal styling to get you started. No more stripping away unwanted styles or overriding stubborn defaults. You can focus on building your design from the ground up.

Modern CSS management

Outside of my job, I'm very used to modern workflows like CSS modules. When I started, every site had its styling done in a single massive CSS file. This frequently led to name collisions and specificity issues galore.

With newtralize, I introduced scoped files, letting you load CSS/JS only on:

  • Specific pages (menu items)
  • Specific articles
  • Specific categories (all articles within)
  • Specific menus (all pages within)

And it's remarkably simple. The template's folder structure looks like this:

1newtralize/
2|-- css/
3|   |-- articles/
4|   |-- categories/
5|   |-- menus/
6|   |-- pages/
7|   |-- custom.css
8|-- js/
9|   |-- articles/
10|   |-- categories/
11|   |-- menus/
12|   |-- pages/
13|   |-- custom.js

All you have to do is create a file in the appropriate directory, named to match the content you're scoping to. Specifically, the formats are:

  • articles: name the file the article's alias
  • categories: name the file the category's alias
  • menus: name the file the menu's alias
  • pages: name the file the menu item's alias

So if you had a page at your-website.com/blog, to scope styles to that page, you would just create the file css/pages/blog.css. That's it, newtralize will load all the relevant files automatically.

Built-in conveniences

The template also includes easy integration for common needs:

  • Google Analytics/Tag Manager setup
  • Meta Pixel configuration
  • FontAwesome integration

Impact on Work

The most impactful feature—CSS and JS scoping—allows for granular control over asset loading without compromising Joomla's core functionality.

This has transformed how our team works. Less technical team members can confidently style pages without worrying about breaking other parts of the site. The scoped approach eliminates the anxiety of CSS specificity wars and name collisions that plagued our previous Joomla development.