Using Joomla

Menu Item Parameters

We could spend the rest of this book going through every Menu Item Parameter for each Menu Item, but you’ll get a much better idea of how they work if we go through the most popular one in detail. The Category Blog Layout has more options than all the others, so we’ll focus on it.

Note

Even though Article Layout is probably more popular, it has fewer options and a lot of them overlap with the Category Blog Layout.

If you went through the Quick Start process in Chapter 2 or you clicked Install Sample Data during the installation process, your website has the Joomla sample data in it. This gives you a good opportunity to click around and see how things are set up. From the backend, hover over Menu and click Example Pages. You may notice that all four of the menu item types discussed in “Menu Item Manager: Menu Item Types Explained, Controlling Layout” are in this menu. Click on Category Blog in order to edit the menu item. Alternatively, you could have checked the box next to it and clicked Edit in the toolbar.

You may notice the Change Type button. This is a feature that is new to Joomla 1.5 and it allows you to change this menu item from a Category Blog Layout to a different one. In the past, you had to create a new menu item and then delete or unpublish the old one, so this comes in handy if you decide you want to display your articles in a different way.

Menu Item Details

These fields apply to all menu item types. You can see this in Figure 7-12.

Figure 7-12. Menu ...