Setting up your Joomla website Part 1 – Joomla Menus
One of the first things you do after you install your Joomlawebsite, is to configure your menus. Joomla menus are fairly straightforward toconfigure (obviously its easy for us to say that), here we’ll give a smallrundown of how Joomla menus work.
Joomla Native Menus
Joomla comes along with a number of menus (when you installthe sample data) to get you started (Top menu, Main menu, User menu). Each menu is basically is made up a list of menu items, (each with their own unique parameters), and a module which is used to display the contents of this menu.It is important to understand this relationship between each menu and its corresponding module, the module is where the menu “lives” and is used to display the menu in the template position where you want it to be displayed.
The menu modules are then assigned to template positions e.g. the top menu to the top position of your template, and the
Obviously, one can apply the menu modules to whatever position is required and whatever position your template supports.
The Menu Manager (Menus > Menu Manager) is the where one can create any additional menus required. When creating a new menu, the Title name will be used as the name of the main menu module which will be used to display the menu.
Menu items
Once a new menu item has been created, you can edit the menu items in the menu. This is done by going to Menus menu and selecting the menu item .e.g Menus > Main Menu.
Here you can add / edit / delete / publish / unpublish menuitems to this particular menu. Pretty straightforward stuff. Menu items can be created to articles, to the frontpage, to any new components, to search etc.The different kinds of menu items will not be described here.
Parent / Child menu items
Typically one would want to create a hierarchy in the menu.You can do this by creating items as children of other menu items. This is done by choosing a Parent, when creating the new menu item.
Displaying the menu
Thus go to Extensions > Module Manager. To find only the menu modules, you can select type to mod_mainmenu. This will only display the menu modules. You can now click on the menu name .e.g Main Menu and set the parameters of the module, including the position in the template where you want the menu to be displayed. You’ll have the standard module parameters on theleft, such as whether to display the title of the module, whether it is enabled, and which position / order. On the right you have parameters which are specific to the menu, i.e. what style to use for the menu and a number of parameters which are specific to the current menu module. Explaining each parameter is beyond the scope of this article.
So that was a very brief intro to Joomla Native menus. Ifyou find any of this unclear, we’d love to hear from you so that we can improve the article …
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