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Organizing Your Articles Using Menus

If you have a set of articles that you would like to group together, you can use menus to organize those articles in an easy-to-navigate fashion.

An example of this can be found on the default hub under the About section (see also below).

  1. To begin, find the URLs of the articles that you're interested in grouping together
    1. Note: If you can't find, or don't know the URL, it comes from the article alias, the section and the category (see below and view these documentation pages: Categories, URLs).
  2. With your article pages created, you'll need to make the menu structure
  3. Navigate to Menus -> Menu Manager on the Joomla! backend and select New.
  4. Give your new menu a unique name and title, then click Save 
  5. Now you will see your new menu in the list.
  6. Click the icon indicated below to start adding menu items to your new menu.
    1. Note: It is important to realize, for clarity's sake, that there is a different between "Menu" and "Menu Item". "Menu Item" represents an instance, or individual menu link, while "Menu" represents the entity as a whole.
  7. Now click the New button to add new menu items to your menu.
  8. After clicking New, scroll down and select External Link.
  9. Next, fill in the necessary information:
    • This is where you'll need to remember the URLs for the articles that you've created (you'll add the URL to the "Link" field)
    • After creating this menu item, you'll be able to access this article page via the URL for the article, or the Alias of the menu item
      • For example: according the screenshot below, both http://yourhub.org/example/examplearticle1 & http://yourhub.org/article1 will work when trying to access this page via the browser (See URL Redirects for more details). For the navigational menus to display properly, though, you'll want to use the menu item alias when trying to access your article page.
  10. Click Save in the upper right-hand corner.
  11. If you switch over to the front-end and navigate to your article page (via the menu item URL), you should see a page similar to this one:
  12. At this point, simply repeat the previous steps to create menu items for all of the articles that you want to use together
  13. The final step in this process is to assign the menu items that you've created to display on the article pages.
  14. To do this, navigate to Extensions -> Module Manager on the backend Joomla! interface
  15. Next, select New.
  16. Scroll down and select Menu from the list (either click on the link, or select the radio button then scroll back up and click "Next").

Now fill in the correct information...make sure to:​​

  • Give it a Title
  • Be sure Enabled is set to Yes
  • Give it the position Left
  • Set it to display on the correct pages
    • Under menu assignment, control click the menus items that we made in the preceding steps. This is what tells Joomla! which pages to display our new menu on.
  • Under Module Parameters, Menu Name should be the title of the menu that we created earlier (example in this case)
  • Menu Style should be List ​
  1. When all of this has been done, click Save.

Redirecting a URL to Another Existing Hub Component

Previously created groups and other components can have URL redirects added to other components instead of transferring all the files and data that live in the previous area to a new section. For example, a professor can redirect a group called "Mainclass" to another group called "Springclass". In order to set up a redirect, follow these steps:

  1. On the backend, locate the tab Menus and select Menu Manager from the drop-down

  2. >Locate the Default menu group

  3. Click on the Default group to enter its menu interface

  4. Try and locate the Parent group. In this case we want groups, however this is not listed, so let’s create it by clicking the New in the top right corner

  5. Create the “groups” part of the URL <www.hubname.org>/groups/mainclass

    1. Click the Select button next to the field Menu Item Type

    2. Select External URL

    3.  To create the groups part of the URL, fill in the form as follows:

      1. ​Menu Item Type: External URL

      2. Menu Title: Groups

      3. Link: groups

    4. Click Save and Close from the top right corner

  6. To create the redirect portion, follow step 5 again except fill out the Menu Title as mainclass and the link as spring2016class

    1. This will redirect users from /groups/mainclass to /groups/spring2016class

  7. Nest “mainclass” under “groups” to create the end result the redirect

    1. This is done in the Menu Item Details under Parent

  8. Set the Parent to Groups

  9. Click Save and Close

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