Audience Level : Joomby  

Menus in Joomla can sometimes be pretty mysterious - I think this is because they are managed from two different places at the moment (this is in Joomla up to version 1.0.11). These are the Menu Manager, and the Module Manager.

On the one hand we have the Menu Manager. This option lets you create new menus. Watch this video to see what the menu manager looks like. In the video, you will see that you create a new menu with a Menu Name and a Menu Title. The distinction between them is actually quite important.

Menu Name is used internally to identify the menu and you will see it being referred to when you access it in the 'Menu' item at the top of your Administration control panel (between 'Site' and 'Content'). This name must be unique and should not contain any spaces.

Menu Title is published as the Title of your menu and even more importantly, it is used as a reference when you work with menus through the Modules option in your Administration control panel.

When you create a menu through the menu manager, a new module is automatically created for it that you can access through the module manager.

Let's see if we can distinguish between the functions of the Menu Manager and the Module Manager.

Let's think of it this way: In the Menu Manager you control WHAT goes into your menus. In other words, the actual menu links. These menu items in turn, link to your content.

The Module manager controls WHERE your menu is displayed, and what it looks like.
You can now watch the video on how to change the look of your menu, through the Module manager. Change your menu orientation video.

You can make copies of your menus in the Menu manager. Each copy that you make will create a corresponding module. All these menu modules are of the type 'mod_mainmenu'.

Remember we said that your menu items control your content?

It is almost impossible for content to appear on your front end if they are not linked in some way to a menu.

Joomla has various ways of publishing content through the menus. Let's look at each of these in turn.

If you select your 'mainmenu' from the 'Menu' dropdown menu at the top of your Administration contol panel (located between 'Site' and 'Content') you will see all the Menu Items currently belonging to the 'mainmenu' menu.

Please note the following important point:

The first menu item (in the 'mainmenu' menu) is the one that determines what will be on the front page! By default it is linked to the 'Front Page' component (more about that later) but really, you could put anything that you like on the front page. You can link to any static page, any content page or any other component. Click on the graphic for the full view picture.

If you select 'New', you will be taken to a next screen where the different types of menus are displayed.

The different menu item types are actually examples of the different types of content and content layouts that you can get in Joomla. The different types of menu items are grouped by Content, by Component, by Links, and by Miscellaneous.

So let's look at these:
Firstly, under Content there is the 'Blog' format. This is basically multiple content items arranged on the page, either with a couple of items in smaller columns next to each other, or in some sort of sequence below each other.

• Blog - Content Category : A list of content items from multiple categories.
• Blog - Content Category Archive : The same as above, but just for archived items.
• Blog - Content Section : A list of content items from multiple sections
• Blog - Content Section Archive : The same as above, but just or archived items.

The next Menu item in this group is actually a bit lower down 

• Table - Content Category. This is a list of content items from a particular Category, but displayed in table format. It will therefore display a list of links to individual content items in that category in the table. If you then click on the link, it will open up the details of the particular content item.

Similar to this is the 'List Content Section'. This will display a list of categories (in link format) for a particular section. If you click on the link for the category, it brings up the Content Items in that category in a table format. 

Apart from that you can link directly to Content Items. So you can link to a particular content item from any category, or you can link to a static content item (remember those - they are pages that don't belong to Categories or Sections).

Submit Content is a relatively new type of link specifically built in so that you can easily provide a link for your customers (or yourself) to submit content from the front end.

Let's move to linking to components.
You can link directly to a component. This is the one and only way to publish components (in other words, to get components 'visible' - to create a menu item to display it.

Or you can link to an existing Joomla component - this is pretty limited really in terms of what you can link to here. I've seldom used this function.

You can link directly to a Contact Item, or to a Table view of contacts.

Then you can also link to a weblink category, a newsfeed item or newsfeed categories.

The 'Links' area I feel is pretty useless, since it just duplicates the various types of links that you find in the Content block and the Components block. It can be pretty confusing to see these since you tend to wonder what the difference could be between these menu item types and the ones that we've already discussed. Well, there is no difference - these are duplicate options. That is why there is a big message at the top that says: Note that some menu types appear in more than one grouping, but they are still the same menu type.

The one type of menu in the 'Links' block that we haven't seen before is the one that links directly to a URL. Here you can either link out of your site to an external URL, or you can even link to specific pages inside your own site by linking directly to the URL - however, I would rather recommend that you use the built in functionality as described above.

You can now watch videos to see how to create menu links for the different types of menus.

Video - add a menu for a blog category

Video - add a menu for a table category

Video - add a menu for a component

Video - add a menu for a link

One last menu type to discuss is the Wrapper. This is a component to display external site content inside your own website through an Iframe Wrapper.

Video - add a menu for a wrapper

Please note that the menu types that are available often change between one version of Joomla and the other (not the actual types themselves, but how they are arranged on the screen when you want to create a new menu). Just be aware that with subsequent versions, you might find the types moving into different categories and blocks depending on how the developers feel that they logically belong to each other. 

End of Tutorial 2

You might want to watch Tutorial 3 - Installing Components, Modules and Templates, as well