Joomla LESS

Most of the Joomla 3.0 default template stylesheets are written using LESS and then compiled to generate the CSS files.

The .less building blocks are located in media/jui/less/. The template specific .lessfiles are located in templates/<templates>/less/.

The CSS generation wrapper script, LESS compiler, and other similar build tools are located in the build/ directory of the Joomla source located on GitHub. Refer to Git_for_Coders for more information on using GitHub. The build directory is only available from the Joomla source, it is not included in an official Joomla release.

To re-generate all the CSS files from a Joomla core distribution, you will need to execute the generation scripts as a CLI application.

For example:

cd joomla-cms/build
c:\xampp\php\php.exe generatecss.php

To generate your own less files in your own template, you will need to take a copy of the generatecss.php script and adjust it to suite your template.

Not all LESS compilers are equal

The LESS compiler used for the Joomla core is obtained from leafo.net/lessphp.