Menus  

Menus are the things that you hang your content on. No menu item, no content!

Remember I said that menus are managed through modules? This can make life quite confusing, so let’s take a good look at the relationship between menus, menu items and menu modules.

In the following screenprint you will see that I point out three different menu groupings. Once at the top (Also called TOPMENU), the MAINMENU and the USERMENU, at the bottom.

Joomla comes pre-installed with 4 menu groupings – the three mentioned above, and one called OTHERMENU. The point is just that you can actually create as many menu groupings as you want, since these menu groupings are nothing other than Modules.

If you go to your Modules Manager in the Administrator backend you will see these four menu groupings (mainmenu, topmenu, usermenu, othermenu). With the Module manager you can therefore do the following with your menus:

	Position them - in other words, move them around in terms of the relative positioning within the available module position placeholders like 'left' (i.e. the left column, 'right' etc)
	Change their appearance (through specifying specific CSS prefixes for styling, or specifying that they should always be expanded or not if you have sub-menus and so on)
	Specifying whether the Title should be displayed or not
	and so forth

The one thing that you will NOT do in the Module manager is create new menu items. This you will do in the Menu Manager.

Under the Menus option on the menus of your administration back end, you will find the following five items:

Now, take my advice and DON’T go into the Menu Manager for now, the topmost option. It will just confuse you since you can’t do anything with your menus directly there.

If you want to add or delete menu items, choose one of the four menu groupings that the specific menu item belongs to, like ‘mainmenu’. In the ‘mainmenu’ Menu Manager you will see all the menu items that belongs to the Main Menu and here you can add new menus, delete menus and also very importantly, specify a lot of parameters on how the content that are linked to each of those menu items should be displayed.

I am not going to go into all the menu options now since this is in a big part related to controlling how content is displayed and this tutorial is getting very long already! I will leave that for a next tutorial.

So – on to content