Beginning Joomla!® Web Site Development

Chapter 5. Managing Menus

Menus form the main navigation of any Joomla!-powered website. They influence not only how your visitors locate content on your site, but they also help determine which component gets loaded for a particular page, where and when modules are published throughout your site, which template is used for a particular page, and which parameters are active for a particular component on a specific page.

In Joomla!, you can have one menu or hundreds of menus, depending on the needs of your site. Like your content structure, you should plan your menu structure carefully. Creating a proper menu structure is like creating a site map for your website, because your menus and menu items determine how the site is structured. In this chapter you learn how to create menus and menu items.

Creating Menus

In Joomla!, you must have at least one menu and at least one menu item within that menu. All access to the site is based on what the menu items tell Joomla! to load, so there is no way to avoid having menus. OK, maybe there is a way, but this book is called "Beginning Joomla!," not "Crazy Joomla! That Even Advanced Joomla! Users Shouldn't Try." Menus are displayed in modules, so it is possible to have a menu that is not visible to your site's visitors by simply disabling the modules that are used to display that menu. The most important thing is that the menu exists in the back end of the site to determine how your site is organized.

Because you need at least one menu and one menu ...