Content Layout

Joomla! provides plenty of flexibility when displaying your Web content. Whether you are using Joomla! for a blog site, news or a Web site for a company, you'll find one or more content styles to showcase your information. You can also change the style of content dynamically depending on your preferences. Joomla! calls how a page is laid out a layout. Use the guide below to understand which layouts are available and how you might use them.

Content

Joomla! makes it extremely easy to add and display content. All content is placed where your mainbody tag in your template is located. There are three main types of layouts available in Joomla! and all of them can be customised via parameters. The display and parameters are set in the Menu Item used to display the content your working on. You create these layouts by creating a Menu Item and choosing how you want the content to display.

Blog Layout

Blog layout will show a listing of all Articles of the selected blog type (Section or Category) in the mainbody position of your template. It will give you the standard title, and Intro of each Article in that particular Category and/or Section. You can customise this layout via the use of the Preferences and Parameters, (See Article Parameters) this is done from the Menu not the Section Manager!

Blog Archive Layout

A Blog Archive layout will give you a similar output of Articles as the normal Blog Display but will add, at the top, two drop down lists for month and year plus a search button to allow Users to search for all Archived Articles from a specific month and year.

List Layout

Table layout will simply give you a tabular list of all the titles in that particular Section or Category. No Intro text will be displayed just the titles. You can set how many titles will be displayed in this table by Parameters. The table layout will also provide a filter Section so that Users can reorder, filter, and set how many titles are listed on a single page (up to 50)

Wrapper

Wrappers allow you to place stand alone applications and Third Party Web sites inside your Joomla! site. The content within a Wrapper appears within the primary content area defined by the "mainbody" tag and allows you to display their content as a part of your own site. A Wrapper will place an IFRAME into the content Section of your Web site and wrap your standard template navigation around it so it appears in the same way an Article would.

Content Parameters

The parameters for each layout type can be found on the right hand side of the editor boxes in the Menu Item configuration screen. The parameters available depend largely on what kind of layout you are configuring.

Content

The content component (com_content) is what you use to write articles. It is extremely flexible and has the largest number of built in views. Articles can be created and edited from the front end, making content the easiest component to use to create your site content. Help

Contacts

The contact component provides a way to provide contact forms and information for your site or to create a complex directory that can be used for many different purposes. Help

Search

Joomla! 2.5 offers two search options.

The Basic Search component provides basic search functionality for the information contained in your core components. Many extensions can also be searched by the search component. Help

The Smart Search component offers searching similar to that found in major search engines. Smart Search is disabled by default. If you choose to enable it you will need to take several steps. First, enable the Smart Search Plugin in the plugin manager. Then, if you are using the Basic Search Module replace it with the Smart Search Module. Finally, if you have already created content, go to the Smart Search component in your site administrator and click the Index icon. Once indexing of your content is complete, Smart Search will be ready to use. Help.

News Feeds

News Feeds (com_newsfeeds) provides a way to organize and present news feeds. News feeds are a way that you present information from another site on your site. For example, the joomla.org website has numerous feeds that you can incorporate on your site. You an use menus to present a single feed, a list of feeds in a category, or a list of all feed categories. Help

Users

The users extension lets your site visitors register, login and logout, change their passwords and other information, and recover lost passwords. In the administrator it allows you to create, block and manage users and create user groups and access levels. Help

Please note that some of the user views will not display if you are not logged-in to the site.

Weblinks

Weblinks (com_weblinks) is a component that provides a structured way to organize external links and present them in a visually attractive, consistent and informative way. Help