Joomla!® Start to Finish: How to Plan, Execute, and Maintain Your Web Site

Chapter 6. Creating and Configuring Menus

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Linking articles to the menu

• Creating blogs

• Creating split menus

• Hiding your site behind a login box

Now that you have content for your site, you're ready to create some menus to link it all together.

In the previous chapter you planned the menus as part of your site map, so you know exactly how many menus you need and the configuration in which you want them to appear.

Menus come in two pieces in Joomla. The first part is the list of links themselves, which are created in the Menu Manager and the Menu Item Manager. The second part of the menu is a module, which determines where on the page the menu will appear and which parts of the menu will display. I cover both halves of menu functioning in this chapter.

The chapter begins by describing how to use the Menu Manager to create menus, and then discusses how to use modules to make those menus appear on your web site. The chapter also gets into some fancier configurations for your menus, as well as how to integrate menus and articles to get you the results you want.

USING THE MENU MANAGER

The Menu Manager is a list of all the menus on your web site. You can have a single menu, or you can have dozens of menus. Fortunately, you already know how many menus you need, because you figured that out when you created your site map. A typical web site has from one to four menus. You must have at least one menu, which is why Joomla creates one for you (Main Menu) as part of the installation, ...