Up and Running with Joomla, 2nd Edition

Adding Menus

Menus are a concept that has changed for the Joomla 1.5 release. There are essentially three steps involved in adding menus, which represent your site navigation:

1. Create Menu

2. Active the Menu by creating a module to house it

3. Add links to the Menu

Creating a Menu

By default, only a single menu is provided—the Main Menu (mainmenu). This may very well be the only menu you need if you have a simple site. But just in case you do not, let's step through creating a new menu.

To add a new menu, which will allow you to associate menu items to the new menu, follow these steps.

1. Select Menu. You should see a list of the current menus for your site, shown in Figure 30. Select Menu Manager from this menu.

   

   Figure 30. Menu Item

2. On the Menu Manager page click the New button. From here, enter the following values. We are going to set up a new menu called About Us that will appear on the right side of our site.

   • Unique Name: rightmenu

   • Title: Right Menu

   • Description: Menu to display on the right

   • Module Title: About Us

3. Once you have entered these values, click Save.

With our menu created, now its time to enable it on the site.

Activating Our Menu

To activate our menu for display purposes we must create a new Menu Module that loads the menu and specify a few parameters, such as where we want it to display (we will give you a hint...on the right).

To create a new Menu Module, follow these steps:

1. Open Extensions ...