Tom McGee's Blog

Any kind of non-linear web site (as opposed to a straight blog, and even then) relies heav­ily on second-tier pages for orga­niz­ing infor­ma­tion by type. Yet one of the less explicit fea­tures in the Mambo/Joomla pack­age is how you do this by use of the menus func­tion. In fact, one ref­er­ence I have on Mambo doesn’t even list “menus” in the index.

As usu­ally described in the doc­u­men­ta­tion and lit­er­a­ture, they are pre­sented pri­mar­ily as nav­i­ga­tional devices, to which you can add cat­e­gory or sec­tion lists, or other con­tent. It’s nice that you can copy menus, move items around and so forth; but there is far more to a menu con­trol than sim­ply what a reader can click on.

In fact, for a menu to be use­ful it doesn’t have to be dis­played any­where. Set­ting up a menu can be a handy way of orga­niz­ing cer­tain sets of index pages for ref­er­ence, for exam­ple. (The doc­u­men­ta­tion uses the word “menu” for both the list­ing as well as the page that you get to when you click on the list­ing. I find this to be con­fus­ing and unhelp­ful, so I’ll refer to the lat­ter as a “hub.”)

The big thing that menus do is cre­ate and con­trol the “hub” pages that orga­nize your cat­e­gories, sec­tions and con­tent. This is where you con­trol the dis­play para­me­ters of a hub, as you con­trol the dis­play para­me­ters of a con­tent item.

Joomla has two tiers of con­tent orga­ni­za­tion avail­able, Sec­tions and their sub-tier Cat­e­gories. The cre­ation and con­fig­u­ra­tion of menu items simul­ta­ne­ously cre­ates and con­fig­ures hub pages for Sec­tions or Categories.

There are three types of hubs for your web site con­tent: con­tent blogs, archive blogs, and tables. Each is avail­able for Cat­e­gories or Sec­tions. (There are other kinds of menu items you can cre­ate, not cov­ered here, such as link pages, news­feeds, sta­tic con­tent, exter­nal URLs.)

In these exam­ples, I’m default­ing to dis­play­ing spe­cific titles, pag­i­na­tion results, descrip­tions, cat­e­gory names, and item titles.

Sec­tion Blog

The default sec­tion blog shows the intro text you entered, fol­lowed by a list­ing of sto­ries. In this exam­ple, the first two stores are part of Cat­e­gory One, and the sec­ond two are from Cat­e­gory Two. Within each pair they are dis­played in reverse chrono­log­i­cal order. The titles above and to the right of the sumaries are click­able (you can’t tell that from here); and above each sum­mary is a click­able link to the con­tents of its con­tain­ing category.

Sec­tion Table

The sec­tion table is pretty sim­ple, just the titles of the cat­e­gories, with their sum­maries and an indi­ca­tion of how many pub­lished items are in each.

Cat­e­gory Blog

Sim­i­lar to the sec­tion blog, dis­plays the sum­mary, and linked titles and sum­maries of the items within that category.

Cat­e­gory Table

The sig­nif­i­cant things in the table link for­mat are the raw title list­ings, the fil­ters and the pag­i­na­tion. (In the basic instal­la­tion these appear above the con­tent; I’ve mod­i­fied the tem­plate so that they are at the bot­tom.) It will list as many items above as you select on the con­fig­ure screen, and as many below. It can then include links to its sib­ling categories.

Key Things to Configure

There are sev­eral dis­play options that are set up glob­ally. Be aware of these, set your pref­er­ences appro­pri­ately depend­ing on the needs of your site, and be pre­pared to over­ride them as nec­es­sary. These include:

• Linked titles. Gen­er­ally useful.
• “Read More” links. Usu­ally use­ful, though for some kinds of short con­tent you may want to just include the whole thing in the sum­mary sec­tion of the con­tent screen, elim­i­nat­ing the need to “read more.”
• Item Rat­ing.
• Author Names.
• Cre­ated Date and Time, Mod­i­fied Date and Time.
• PDF, print and mail icons. You can have icons and links appear on each page link­ing to short­cuts to these functions.

Then there are sev­eral more spe­cific, and I sup­pose more fre­quently cus­tomized, options:

• Menu Image: If you like icons in your menu listings.
• Page Class Suf­fix: This is really use­ful. The CSS classes in the hub pages will have this string appended to them. So a class that might have been “cat­e­go­ry­head­ing” will instead be “categoryheading_xxxxx”, where “_xxxx” is what you enter here. Using an under­score char­ac­ter to start is a good prac­tice for leg­i­bil­ity. These can be unique or just use the same one for mul­ti­ple areas.
• Back But­ton: Per­son­ally I like using the built-in browser fea­tures when­ever pos­si­ble, because hav­ing two things doing almost the same thing is confusing.
• Page Title: If you want a nicer page title than just the title of the sec­tion, put it here, and select the “show” radio but­ton underneath.
• #Leading/#Intro/#Columns/#Links: These con­trol how many sub­sidiary items are dis­played. The Lead­ing item can be styled dif­fer­ently from the rest. If you don’t want that, enter “0”. The Intro items have titles and sum­maries (if that’s how you con­fig­ured them), and the Links items are sim­ply click­able titles. If you don’t want any­thing appear­ing with­out sum­maries, enter “0” here as well. I don’t know about Columns, because they aren’t rel­e­vant to the Acces­si­ble Joomla package.
• Order: Mul­ti­ple self-explanatory options are here. “Pri­mary Order” is the default set­ting, what­ever you’ve made it; “Order­ing” is the order you set within that cat­e­gory or sec­tion, from the cat­e­gory and sec­tion man­ager pages.
• Pag­i­na­tion: Default is prob­a­bly most use­ful here; it shows where nec­es­sary, and hides where not. If you only want the first n items, you’ll set hide, and set the num­ber of dis­play items to n.
• MOS Images: a Joomla fea­ture that lets you assign images to cat­e­gories and sections.
• Cat­e­gory Name and Cat­e­gory Name Link­able: In a Sec­tion page, you can have the sub­sidiary cat­e­gory dis­played as a help­ful reference.
• Item Title: I can imag­ing cir­cum­stances under which you wouldn’t need to dis­play the title, for exam­ple a group of adver­tis­ers for which you have logos. It wouldn’t be nec­es­sary to say “Exxon,” and imme­di­ately below it show an Exxon logo.

Data­base Entry IDs

When a menu item is cre­ated, there are three crit­i­cal data items to be aware of. One is the “option.” This is the word appear­ing in the URL that indi­cates what kind of page it is. This can be “blog­sec­tion,” “blog­cat­e­gory,” or sev­eral oth­ers. The sec­ond is the “id” or “CID”. This rep­re­sents the assigned Sec­tion ID or Cat­e­gory ID. The third is the Item ID, which rep­re­sents the spe­cific Menu Item that you have cre­ated. The Item ID and CID for any hub can be found on the Menu Man­ager page for any spe­cific menu con­tain­ing that hub.

Trans­lat­ing index.php URLs to SEO URLs

These are impor­tant because you have to build your own URLs if you are using the SEO fea­ture. The details screen for a menu item shows some­thing like /index.php?option=com_content&task=blogsection&id=11&Itemid=66

but if you’re using SEO you’ll need some­thing like:

/content/blogsection/11/66

A blog cat­e­gory will look like /content/blogcategory/5/14/69, where 5 is the sec­tion, 14 the cat­e­gory and 69 the item ID of that par­tic­u­lar menu.

You either have to pick this infor­ma­tion off of a live page that dis­plays the menu, or do the trans­po­si­tion your­self. Of course, if you’re just using the menu your URL is gen­er­ated auto­mat­i­cally; but if you’re using the menu orga­ni­za­tion­ally, or as a pri­vate link, you’ll need this. The “Blog Archive” type is a lit­tle dif­fer­ent; the given URL will have some­thing like “archivesection&id=xx&Itemid=yy”. This translates

/content/section/xx/yy

I have some prob­lems with this par­tic­u­lar imple­men­ta­tion on my instal­la­tion; it may because of my com­bi­na­tion of SEF plus the “acces­si­ble Joomla” pack­age. The actual menus dis­play /content/archivesection/xx/yy, but click­ing on it returns a per­mis­sions error. I may have this part wrong alto­gether, and your mileage may vary.

The Main Point

The main point being, if you want a hub page to look and behave a spe­cific way, you need to cre­ate a menu item and do the con­fig­u­ra­tion from the menu item. One might think that it would make more sense to do it from the cat­e­gory or sec­tion page; but on the other hand this does give you the flex­i­bil­ity to dis­play the same con­tent in dif­fer­ent ways, depend­ing on con­text or audience.

In con­clu­sion, some of this may not be right on, and I apol­o­gize in advance. But I hope this is help­ful in some way to pre­vent you from going up any dead ends as you first build sites in this pack­age. A lit­tle advance plan­ning, and some test­ing of some dummy copy, is a good idea. Once you get a feel for how it han­dles your pref­er­ences, the full pro­duc­tion cycle will go a lot more smoothly.