JenTekk Blog

Vancouver’s Joomla 1.5 DocCamp was a huge success, with over a dozen participants eager to learn more about Joomla 1.5, and document their experience.

For me, deciding on which aspect of Joomla 1.5 to write about was easy. Having worked with Joomla 1.0 before (template design and information architecture) I was curious to see what changes had been made - if any - to the content development and menu management process.

Content Item name change to: Article

The first thing I noticed about Joomla 1.5 is that a Content Item (v. 1.0) is now called an Article. I like this!! I found it too easy (after staring at my computer screen for hours) to visually confuse the word Category with Content. Simplifying the name Content Item to Article somehow made the difference between the two words more (visually) obvious. Yeah, I’m that challenged by the end of the day.

Uncategorized Section and Category

Previously in Joomla 1.0, users needed to create a Section and Category before being able to save a Content Item. This isn’t that big of a deal, but I always thought it would be nice to be able to write and save a Content Item - before a decision had been made as to which Section or Category it belonged to.

To my surprise, Joomla 1.5 has created a Section named Uncategorized and a Category named Uncategorized, so that if you’ve not yet decided where to place your Article, you can save it in an Uncategorized Section/Category, and assign it to the appropriate Section/Category later on - nice touch!

Menu Management: slick!

My self-appointed mission was to create a couple of Articles, and a new Menu. To challenge myself further, I wanted my new menu, and new menu items (with 1 sub-menu item) to only be displayed on specific pages. This was my journey…

Joomla! Administration Login: pretty self explanatory - here I am, logging in!

Control Panel: Upon logging in, I arrived at the “Control Panel” with the first icon being exactly what I was after! I clicked on “Add New Article”.

Article [New]: I first created a new article, and associated it with a “Section” and “Category”. I chose “Uncategorized” for both, and clicked “Save”.

Article Manager: once my new article was saved, I was directed to the “Article Manager” page, where I was able to see all previously saved articles including my new article. I created 2 articles: ‘test1′ and ‘Child Item’… I am planning to place the ‘Child Item’ article as a sub-menu link under ‘test1′ - getting fancy shmancy!

Menu Manager: next I will create my new menu by going to the “Menu Manager”, and clicking on the “New” icon at the top right of the page.

Menu [New]: below I am creating a new menu - I called mine ‘New Menu’! * Note: when you create a new menu, a new menu module is automatically created in the “Module Manager” section if you fill in the “Module Title” - another nice touch!

Menu Item Manager: next I wanted to add some menu items to my ‘New Menu’, so I clicked on the “Menu Item(s)” icon for my ‘New Menu’ on the “Menu Manager” page. When I arrived at the “Menu Item Manager” page (below), there were no “Menu Items” listed because I hadn’t yet added any.

Menu Item [New]: to add an “Menu Item” I simply clicked on “New” at the top right of the “Menu Item Manager” page and was directed to a choice of “Menu Item Types” for my new menu item. I chose “Article > Article Layout”. I repeated this step, and the following step for each menu item I added.

Menu Item [New]: this is where I am able to name my new menu item and choose its “Parent”. I named my first item ‘Item One’ I chose “Top” as its “Parent”. For my ‘Child or Submenu’ menu item, I chose ‘Item One’ as the “Parent”. I also added Monica’s test page as one of my menu items as you will soon see!

Menu Item Manager: Now the “Menu Item Manager” for my newly created menu looks like this (below). Notice the ‘Child or Submenu’ item is linked with the ‘Item One’ menu item. Sweet!

Module Manager: next I went to the “Module Manager” to configure my new menu, remembering that the “Menu Manager” had already created the new menu module for me.

Module[Edit]: I clicked on my newly created ‘New Menu’ on the “Module Manager” page (above image) and arrived at the “Module [Edit]” page (image below). This is where I chose which page or pages I wished my ‘New Menu’ to appear in. In addition, I also chose its “Menu Style” (”List”) and “Module Class Suffix” ( _menu) so that my ‘New Menu’ would render the same as the other website’s main menus.

Voila! Both the above style choices rendered the look of my New Menu to match the website’s main menus. In addition, you can see I was also successful in positioning my ‘Child or Submenu’ item below ‘Item One’, AND… my ‘New Menu’ only appeared on the 3 pages I assigned it to. It was that easy!!

That’s it - so easy, so slick - I’m done! Joomla… you make menu management mmmarvelous!

Technorati Tags: joomla, joomla doccamp, joomla 1.5, menu managment, jentekk

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 at 3:24 pm and is filed under Joomla, Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.