By A Web Design

Creating An Article And Binding It To A Menu Item In Joomla 1.7

To create an article and bind it to a menu item in Joomla 1.7, login to Joomla as administrator, by simply entering the url_of_your_website/administrator in your Browser. Enter the appropriate username and password {which was provided while installing Joomla} and then click on Login as shown in Diagram 1.

Diagram 1

After logging in to the backend, a control panel page opens as shown in Diagram 2.

The Control Panel provides access to many default Joomla! functions and features. From the Control Panel, you can create and manage articles and categories. Other features available in the Control Panel are the media, menu, language, and user managers.

Diagram 2

Create A Category:

Start this process by creating a category in Joomla 1.7, please refer to the tutorial Category Manager in Joomla 1.7 on this website.

Suppose, the category created is titled – Content Management System - as shown in Diagram 3. In our case, this will be the parent category.

Diagram 3

Create An Article:

Next create an article in Joomla 1.7, please refer to the tutorial Article Manager In Joomla 1.7 on this website.

Title the article – Joomla – and place this article under the category above is as shown in Diagram 4.

Diagram 4

After creating an article and binding this to a specific category, you will need to display this article to visitors who come to the website. To do this you will need a clickable - Menu item - on the website page which will invoke this article when clicked and display it to the site visitor.

Creating Menu Item:

In the top menu of the Joomla Administrator’s, user interface, locate Menus. Click Menus, from the drop down menu that appears click Main Menu as shown in Diagram 5.

Diagram 5

The Menu Manager screen opens. This is where you can create new menu items or edit existing menu items.

Click on New at the top-right hand corner to create a new menu item as shown in Diagram 6.

Diagram 6

The Menu Manager: New Menu Item screen opens as shown in Diagram 7. Before adding any information to this form, select the Menu Item Type.

Click Select as shown in Diagram 7.

Diagram 7

Select the specific menu item type from the list of menu item. In our case, select the Single Article menu item type to display it as a single article as shown in Diagram 8.

Diagram 8

Enter the menu title – Joomla CMS - and its alias name just below. While any alias can be used it makes the most sense to use the menu title, in lowercase, without spaces or underscores, as the menu title alias.

In required settings, select the article – Joomla - as shown in Diagram 9.

Click on Save and Close as shown in Diagram 9, in order to save the menu item and close the edit screen.

NOTE: You can either click on Save, in order to save the menu item data and stay on the editable screen.

Diagram 9