Joomla!® 24-Hour Trainer

13

Linking Articles to the Menu

You've worked hard on your site, creating all kinds of content and inserting images and videos into it. Unfortunately, with the exception of placing these articles on the home page, no one can see what you've done so far! That's because you haven't yet linked anything to a menu. Fortunately, the wait is over!

You can make many kinds of menu links using Joomla. You can link a single article to the menu, or you can make a blog or a list of articles.

Menus require two pieces of functionality to work. First, the menu itself must be created, under the Menus navigation item in the back end of Joomla. Second, once the menu is created, Joomla needs to know where to display it on the site. Menu display is controlled via a module, a small piece of functionality to supplement the website's content.

In this lesson, we'll be working in the Main Menu, which is currently displayed in the left column of the website. It is possible to move this menu to a horizontal orientation, split the menu over a top horizontal bar and a left vertical bar, or even create flyout or dropdown menus. However, these are all more complicated layouts to set up. For now, we'll stick to leaving the navigation in the Main Menu module. In a later lesson, you'll learn more methods for displaying menus.