If you're like me, a simple and minimalistic web design fans, who doesn't like to bloat my site with lots of features like javascripts or flash, then we undoubtedly want to know how to remove this mootools javascript library which is loaded by default on our J! 1.5 template because we want our site load faster especially for people in a country who still live with such an expensive internet bandwith charge.

Lucky us this week Rockettheme has released a Joomla 1.5 template that acclaimed to be the fastest Joomla template, full featured and the most important part is it's FREE. Woohoo!

Afterburner has been optimised to perfection, holding performance and speed at its heart, without compromising on much needed features. The size of the frontpage of a default Joomla install, using Afterburner, is 59KB. this is in contrast to 155KB with the default Joomla theme. The difference is staggering, resulting in a ultra lean, fast loading and high performance template.

You can read all of it's features - performaance, search engine optimised template layout, and template variations etc on Rockettheme AfterBurner Demo site.

What I can learn from this AfterBurner template is how they do the mootools exclusions from the head tag. "The theme has a built in option to disable the mootools.js file that is loaded by Joomla as standard. This removes a 70KB file from load time resulting in greater performance."

They did this on the rt_utils.php file,

jimport('joomla.filesystem.file');
// remove mootools.js and caption.js if set in params
$headerjs = $this->getHeadData();
reset($headerjs['scripts']);
foreach ($headerjs['scripts'] as $script=>$type) {
if (($mootools_enabled == "false" and strpos($script,'mootools.js')) or ($caption_enabled == "false" and strpos($script,'caption.js'))) {
unset($headerjs['scripts'][$script]);
}
}
$this->setHeadData($headerjs);

This is great feature for a free template. Ahh one thing. I've been 3 years work as a template support guy and I have found lots of complains about the template that is broken when user work using the editor from the frontpage. And AfterBurner again make our life simpler by providing the condition to hide the right module wrapper so we can have a full width mainbody or content wrapper and more space for the editor. Here's also from the rt_utils.php,

//Are we in edit mode
$editmode = false;
if (JRequest::getCmd('task') == 'edit' ) : $editmode = true; endif;
$leftcolumn_width = ($this->countModules('left')>0) ? $leftcolumn_width : 0;
$rightcolumn_width = (!$editmode and $this->countModules('right')>0) ? $rightcolumn_width : 0; 

That what are these for, right RT? CMIIW...I'm just a noob...

Ahh yes anether thing, AfterBurner also had override the default table content component layout. So now we can easily get our content layout tableless.