News Feeds: Category List Layout

Description

The News Feeds-category list layout menu type creates a menu link to display a list of all News Feed Categories.

News Feeds and News Feeds Categories are entered by selecting the menu Components -> News Feeds as shown in Diagram1.

The first step in this process will be to add a new category to place your news in.

You can access the news category through menu Components -> News Feeds -> Categories. The screen shows you an overview of any categories that already exist. By default there will be some category included. You can create a new category by clicking on New icon at the top-right hand corner.

After creating the news categories you can add news to the category.

In order to add news to the category; navigate through Components -> News Feeds -> Feeds as shown in Diagram 1.

Note: News Feed Categories are separate from Article Categories.

Diagram 1

A News Feed Manager is displayed as shown in Diagram 2.

Here, you can add, edit and delete news feeds. Click on New at the top-right hand corner for adding a new news feed.

Diagram 2

The configuration of the news feed manager opens as shown in Diagram 3.
The Details section is taking in values such as:

Name: The Name of the News Feed. This field is required.
Alias: The internal name of the item. Normally, you can leave this blank and Joomla will fill in a default value. The default value is the Title or Name in lower case and with dashes instead of spaces. You may enter the Alias manually. The Alias should consist of lowercase letters with no blank spaces. You can use a hyphen (-) instead of blank spaces. The Alias will be used in the URL when SEF is activated.
Published: You can set this item as published. Select ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ from the radio button group to set the published state for this item.
Category: You have to select the category for this News Feed. You can select it from the drop-down list box of News Feed Categories.
Link: You have to enter the link to this News Feed. It should begin with "http://".
Number of Articles: Enter the number of articles from the feed which will be available to your users. By default its 5.
Cache Time: The number of seconds to keep a News Feed saved on your server before it is downloaded again. The default value is 3600 seconds, which is 1 hour. When a News Feed is cached locally, your server only has to read the News Feed periodically (in this case, once per hour). A longer cache time means that you will have less network traffic and your site will load a little bit faster, but it also means your News Feed will be more out-of-date.
Order: It indicates the order of this News Feed in the News Feed Manager. The default Order is to add the item to the end of the list. To select a different position, use the drop-down list box. This item will move to the position just after the item selected from the drop-down list.
RTL Feed: Check this box if the feed is right-to-left. This is for languages that read right-to-left.

Diagram 3

Click Save at the top right hand corner, the news feed will be successfully saved in the news feed manager as shown in Diagram 4.

Diagram 4

Now, to make the component visible into the front end of Joomla, you have to create a menu item link to a news feeds category.

From the Select Menu item type, click on the News Feeds link under the Internal Link this expands, then click on the Category List Layout link as shown in Diagram 5.

Diagram 5

On clicking, the Category List Layout Link, the control settings for this menu item opens as shown in Diagram 6.

Menu Item Details

Enter the required details in the Title, Alias, Display in, Parent item and Published for the menu item.
The explanation of each of the menu item details is given in Lesson 2.

Parameters

On the right hand side, the Parameters – Basic has various configurations:

Limit Box: Hide or Show the Limit Box, shown below. This allows the User to limit the number of items that will display per page.
Description: Hide or Show the News Feed Description Text, entered below. If 'Show' is selected, the Description text will be displayed just below the Page Title.
Description Text: The text to display as the News Feed Description.
Image: Image for this Page. Image must be located in the folder "images/stories".
Image Align: Align the image on the left or right side of the page.

Diagram 6

Parameters (Component) for News Feeds are as shown in Diagram 7.

Table Headings: You can ‘Hide’ or ‘Show’ the column headings above the fields for the item.
Name Column: You can ‘Hide’ or ‘Show’ the Feed Name column.
# Articles Column: You can ‘Hide’ or ‘Show’ the number of Articles in the News Feed.
Link Column: You can ‘Hide’ or ‘Show’ the News Feed link.
Category Description: You can ‘Hide’ or ‘Show’ the Description for each Category.
# Category Items: You can ‘Hide’ or ‘Show’ the number of Articles in each Category.
Feed Image: You can ‘Hide’ or ‘Show’ the image of the News Feed.
Feed Description: You can ‘Hide’ or ‘Show’ the description text of the News Feed.
Item Description: You can ‘Hide’ or ‘Show’ the Description/Intro Text of an item.
Word Count: The field contains the maximum number of words to display in the Item Description. A value of ‘0’ will display all of the text.

Diagram 7

Click on Save at the top right hand corner this menu item would be successfully created and saved in the Menu Item Manager as shown in Diagram 8.

Diagram 8

Click on Preview at the top-right hand corner to view the front page of your website.
In the main menu, the News Category List menu item is created as shown in Diagram 9.

Diagram 9

Click on the News Category List menu link.