How to create a hierarchical Joomla! menu structure - joomla

I need an advice ...
I'm using joomla 1.7.2.
I want to plan a site, the site should be very hierarchical.
Actually it will contain categories and sub categories and sub categories and ... And finally all relevant articles that will be under the sub-sub ... Category that was selected.
My ambition from Joomla is to create a main categories menu that looks something like that (never mind the graphics at the moment):
menu example here
Clicking a category will lead to the same look a like menu with his sub-categories.
I guess you could create an article for each category that will contain a menu that will display the relevant sub-categories. but it seems incorrect.
Is there a more correct way to build the hierarchical structure of the site menus?
Sorry about the long text.
I would appreciate any response.
Yoni.

Seems like you are going to make your users click a lot of links to get to the content. How deep do you plan to go? You might want to look in to one of the many mega menus to make it a little easier to get to what they are looking for.
In any case, the basic functionality you are looking for is built in to the core Joomla menu. First, you would need to create a single menu with the structure you described. Link the parent menus to the Joomla category. The trick is in the parameters of the menu module. You will need one menu module for each level of categories you have in your hierarchy. Each module will need to be assigned to every menu item on the corresponding level and the start and end level parameters will need to be set to one level below the current level (0 being the root or top level). You will also want to have sub menu display turned off.
when you click through the links the menu will only display the child menus of the current menu item you are on.

If you want to create an hierarchical menu in Joomla you have to "split" the menu in different parts. Please follow these tutorials:
TODO: Creating a split menu in Jooma
Video TODO: Joomla's
Split Menu System

Related

What is best way to present a searchable/sortable list of data with entries having more than one title?

Building a web site with a data list (or directory) with some entries having more than one title. The entries need to appear in the list for each title. The list needs to function similarly to Linux's symbolic links where there are more than one directory entry pointing to the same data. Are there any recommendations on how to do this?
Tags (in Articles) were invented for that.
Or Custom fields. Or a CCK. It is about a Many-to-Many relation, or One-to-Many.
Please specify your needs: what is the difference between your "entries" and your "titles"? What are they?
One option may be to store the data in articles and create multiple menu options pointing to the same article.
A hidden menu (one that is not displayed explicitly on the website) can be created if there's no need to display the information in a menu.
You can configure the menu items to display the menu title as the page heading (rather than the article title) if you wish.
Menu items matching a search term will show up in Joomla search results.
Joomla does not offer any option to automatically sort menu items in a menu automatically but you can probably find a third party menu that can do this e.g.
Art Responsive Menu (free) looks like it has an option to sort by menu title.

Virtuemart Joomla menu highlights wrong item

I have a Virtuemart 1.1.7a install on Joomla 1.5. We're using a Joomla menu as the shop side menu. Not every category is listed in this menu (only the 'parent' categories, no subcategories). When users navigate to a sub category (i.e one not in the list) it highlights the wrong category from the side menu. You can see this on:
http://www.lochlomond-trossachs.org/books.html
and selecting 'Local Authors'. Then menu item 'Postcards' is highlighted on the left.
It would be preferable to either a) highlight no category or b) highlight 'Books' (which is the parent category of 'Local Authors').
I've had a look on the VM forums and web at large for issues with Joomla menus in VM, but the vast majority of results relate to an earlier problem regarding Itemids loading the wrong products ,but this is not the case here. Simply fixing the highlight would suffice!
Yes, virtuemart has issues with this. Unless you want to dive into the Virtuemart code (which can take you a long time to find the code dealing with the Itemid), I would recomment to add extra menu-items under the category that is it's parent. If you don't want these to be visible, you can go to the menu module and set the depth of the menu. The right parent would now be highlighted, because it has a child in it's roots.
Here is something that might help: http://forum.virtuemart.net/index.php?topic=70482.0
I didn't see "Local Authors", but I saw the problem with Gifts (when I click on Gift, and then on Mugs, for example, I have postcards highlighted). I believe the problem is either in your template or in your data itself.
Try to remake all the menu buttons as in delete and create new ones.
Turns out using Joomla menus for VM categories just doesn't really work that well. Replaced Joomla menu with VM menu (i.e. mod_virtuemart), and styled to suit.

URLs in module not pointing the correct category from index page

I have 2 modules on my home page. One lists most popular, one lists most recent k2 items from 2 different categories, video and blog. The links to the blog entires go to /blog/item/, so the side bar modules are being displayed correctly. But for some reason the video entries are linking to /component/k2/item/, and on that page the modules that are supposed to on the right do not show up at all. The content area takes up the entire width of the site.
What is further confusing about this situation is that i have duplicates of those modules running on certain interior pages, with the same settings, that link to the items correctly. The only reason i have 2 of the same module is because i need that same module to display below the content on index page, and in the side bar on select interior pages.
I do not have a menu item that links to the video category. The main category is Education, and there are 3 sub categories. blog, video, article. There are only menu items for Blog, and for Education. I already have that same module in the some of the interior pages, and it works fine.
what am i doing wrong?
The solution is pretty simple, the explanation is rather complicated. Here is the solution -
Create a new menu, call it hidden links or something. Doesn't matter what is it called, you will not display this menu on the site.
Create a new menu item for the video category.
Assign your modules to that hidden menu item.
If you don't care about what is happening, just know that you can always create hidden menu items to control layout on pages.
If you do care, get a cold drink and get comfortable...
Menu items in Joomla server several different purposes other than providing links for users to get to content. If you are using the core SEF URLs, this is the first place Joomla looks to create those URLs. In general a URL is built like this - joomla install/parent menu item alias/sub menu item alias/content item/article alias.html. Since your video category does not have a corresponding menu item to use for building URLs, it uses the default URL scheme.
The menu item is also the source for the itemID that every page uses. If a particular page does not have a related menu item, it will inherit the itemID from the previous page usually or in the case of k2 items/joomla article it will inherit the itemID from the menu item that links to the parent category of the content. The itemID is used to determine module menu assignment. This is why getting to a particular page that does not have a menu item 2 different ways will often give you pages that look different, different itemIDs were inherited resulting in different modules being displayed.
Since Joomla really counts on the itemID, you should always specify a menu item for any content you are diplaying, even if you do not want to display a link in the menu. By creating a menu that does not appear in a module, you still get the itemID you need for the content, but the menu never appears anywhere. Usually, a link to a category will be enough since child content will pick up that itemID, but in some cases it makes sense to create menu items to specific content items/articles. You would do this any time you want a specific URL for an item. For example, if you wanted to create a URL like your-site.com/special-offer, you could create the content item for the special offer, then make a menu item with the alias special-offer to get the correct URL.
Joomla also uses the menu item for browser titles and page titles. Your question is not related to that so I'll stop here, but as you can tell it is pretty important to know when to create a menu item for your content.

Magento - Link attributes with sub-categories or include attribute value in navigation

I'm creating a video game ecommerce store and I need to have the navigation structured so that the navigation bar contains all the major consoles. When someone hovers over one of the console navigation links, a drop down menu appears with each genre option. For example, once you hover over Xbox 360, a drop down menu with Action, Adventure, etc. will show up.
My first thought is to create sub-categories in each major category that represent each genre. There would also be a custom attribute field for genre. I would then have to manually export the product database and fill it in for each product.
Is there an easier way to do this that I don't know about? Is it possible to have attributes as the drop-down menu links in the navigation bar?
One thing I've noticed in the Manage Attributes section is the option to Use in Layered Navigation. As far as I can tell, this links the attribute in the sidebar and not the main navigation bar.
For reference, my website is at http://allyourga.me
There is no default functionality to do what you are describing. The default Magento way to accomplish this is via subcategories. You are correct about Layered Navigation, that is a sidebar feature inside the catalog.
You could do some custom coding around showing the attributes in the dropdown menu, but the dropdown links lead to categories anyway, so you'd need to create those regardless. Another approach would be a cronjob that created the necessary categories for the products and placed them into those categories on command. You'll need to add a "console" attribute to make this work as well.
Hope that helps!
Thanks,
Joe

Joomla conditional pages and menus

I'm trying to make a "Chapter selector" for my organization's website. I want to be able to select, say, the "Bay Area chapter" and have the site display articles and events for the Bay Area chapter (while keeping the chapter-independent parts of the site the same). How do I accomplish this?
I'd need a little more detail but here are some of the things to consider -
I am a fan of K2 for being able to nest categories, but you can at least categorize all of your Chapter information in to separate categories within a single section in the Joomla content manager.
For each Category you will need a menu item - Articles > Category > Category blog Layout
In the module manager you will need corresponding modules that display category related information. Be sure to associate the modules to the correct menu items in the module's Menu Assignment area.
I'd do the chapter selector as a menu. Create a menu to contain your chapters and then publish a module for that menu which allows you to pick your items with that chapter.

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