Joomla!® For Dummies®

Chapter 5. Building Navigation into Your Site with Menus

In This Chapter

• Understanding menus in Joomla

• Adding submenus

• Working with list layouts

• Putting menu options to work

• Creating a default menu item

• Using menu separators

Menus in Joomla are central to everything — more so than people not in the know can imagine. You can't view a Web page in Joomla that doesn't have a menu item pointing to it, and when you create a menu item, you select the layout of the Web page to which it points.

Joomla packs a lot into menus, and this chapter is theirs.

All about Joomla Menus

Because Web pages don't exist in Joomla until the data in those pages is accessed through menu items, Joomla wraps all the presentation details of Web pages into menu items. Templates (see Chapter 9) may be responsible for what goes where in a page, using a mix of HTML and CSS, but the menu item determines what template Joomla uses to lay out the resulting Web page.

When you create a menu item, you specify the layout that Joomla will use to display the linked-to Web page, and you can choose among a large number of options. You can create standard Web pages (stand-alone articles), category pages (which show an overview of all the articles in that category), and section pages (which show an overview of all the articles in that section). You can publish to the front page of your site or to external sites. You can also link to specific types of modules: polls, search boxes, wrappers (which present external pages in Joomla pages; see ...