Joomla is a popular CMS application, now I am using Joomla 1.7.  A lot of modules are available to download and each module has its own layout. Sometimes we may need to override the existing layout of a module. In order to override a module’s layout, we don’t need to update the module’s own layout files, instead we can create our own layout files to override the existing layout.

I will show you how to override a module’s layout with the help of an example. One of the most important module in Joomla is the menu module. Its files are located inside the  mod_menu directory inside the modules directory. The layout files of this particular module are located inside the tmpl directory. If you want to override these layout files, you have to move the layout files to your current template’s directory. My current template name is beez5 ( beez5 comes with Joomla) and I am going to move these layout files(files in side the tmpl directory) to the beez5 folder, before moving all the files, we have to make a few directories inside the template(beez5) directory. I have to create a new folder with name “html” inside the template folder to override the layout file (html folder is present in most of the templates) .I have to create one more folder inside the “html” directory as the name of the overriding module, so I have created a new folder with name “mod_menu”, then we have to paste the entire files in the tmpl directory to this directory. You can make what ever changes you need in the layout in the new files and when Joomla renders module mod_menu’s output, it takes the layout files from the mod_menu directory in the template folder.