I'm currently building a Joomla 1.5 template for someone and they need the following functionality. When a user clicks on a certain button that the layout of the website will change slightly (e.g. expand one area and hide some areas) and then when the click another button then it will switch back to the original layout. What is the best way to achieve this?
You can assign templates to menu item basis. Navigate to Extension > Template Manager and click on one of the templates in the list. A page will appear that has a Menu Assignment panel congaing a list of menus and their items. To have one template for the front page and another for all other pages, you would have one template that is assigned to the "Home" item. And another template that is assigned to all menu items but "Home".