Menus
Overview
A Hub menu is a website navigation menu where users go to navigate around the Hub. The Main Menu is the first navigation path that users interact with from your landing page and usually lives in your template header. Additional menus can be added to content pages on the Hub in order to link like pages together for easier navigation. The general rule of thumb is that if a content page is not linked to a menu, the likelihood of the page being discovered by users is diminished.
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).
- To begin, find the URLs of the articles that you're interested in grouping together
- 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).
- With your article pages created, you'll need to make the menu structure
- Navigate to Menus -> Menu Manager on the Joomla! backend and select New
- Give your new menu a unique name and title, then click Save
- Now you will see your new menu in the list
- Click the icon indicated below to start adding menu items to your new menu
- Note: It is important to realize, for clarity's sake, that there is a difference between Menu and Menu Item.
- Menu Item: represents an instance, or individual menu link
- Menu: represents the entity as a whole
- Note: It is important to realize, for clarity's sake, that there is a difference between Menu and Menu Item.
- Now click the New button to add new menu items to your menu
- After clicking New, scroll down and select Link
- 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/article1will 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.
- For example: according the screenshot below, both
- Click Save in the upper right-hand corner
- 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:
- At this point, simply repeat the previous steps to create menu items for all of the articles that you want to use together
- The final step in this process is to assign the menu items that you've created to display on the article pages
- To do this, navigate to Extensions -> Module Manager on the backend Joomla! interface
- Next, select New
- 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
- When all of this has been done, click Save
Redirecting a URL to Another Existing Hub Component
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:
- Navigate to /administrator, locate the tab Menus and select Menu Manager from the drop-down
- Locate the Default menu group
- Click on the Default group to enter its menu interface
- 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
- Create the “groups” part of the URL
/groups/mainclass Click the Select button next to the field Menu Item Type Select External URL To create the groups part of the URL, fill in the form as follows: Menu Item Type: External URL Menu Title: Groups Link: groups
Click Save & Close from the top right corner To create the redirect portion, follow step 5 again except fill out the Menu Title as mainclass and the link as spring2016class This will redirect users from /groups/mainclass to /groups/springdefaultclass Nest mainclass under groups to create the end result from the redirect This is done in the Menu Item Details under Parent Set the Parent to Groups Click Save & Close
Creating a New Menu
- Navigate to /administrator
- Hover over Menus -> Menu Manager and click on Add New Menu
- Fill out the new menu information
- Click Save & Close
- From Menu Manager: Menus, locate your new menu and click on Add a module for this menu type under Modules linked to the menu
- Create the new module for your menu by filling in the module configuration information
- Note: Most menu modules are left aligned
- Click Save & Close
- Create new menu items, either linked to articles you have created or linked to various components, by navigating to Menus and clicking on your new menu
- Click on the Menu Items tab and click the New button to create menu items
- Note: Once you have linked menu items to your new menu, navigate back to "Extensions" -> Module Manager -> Click on your new menu module -> Confirm the Menu Assignment for your module is affiliated with the new menu items you created