menu

• Navigation

  To find your way around the website, you will need navigation with corresponding links. In Joomla! we call this a menu. You may create as many menus as desired and nest them into as many different ways as you wish. Each menu is a module which can be positioned on a provided area in the template.

  Important note: Joomla! is a genuinely menu driven system, the most important behaviors: as what module when to be shown, what template to be used on a certain page, etc all can be controlled using by associating behaviors to menu items. So, plan carefully your menu - it is the core of your site's end user experience!

• PHP code snippets to conditionally add things to your template

  The Joomla ItemID-related management of modules is a powerful tool, but sometimes you need to show/hide parts of your site on two special cases not covered by this tool: when you need to show/hide things regardless of the active ItemID - for example on all detail listings page of a given component, or when you need to deal with a component which have poor support of ItemIDs - as VirtueMart, which is notoriously misbehaving in this regard.

• Save Failed with the Following Error: Invalid Parent ID

  When I have seen first time this error on Joomla 1.6 while tried to save a new article in Article Manager I was lost:

  Save Failed with the Following Error: Invalid Parent ID
• Secure your standalone scripts used in a Joomla site

  Joomla has everything you may need. Right? If you take a look to the Joomla Extensions site, you may agree with this. But, as always, there may be cases, when the above statement is wrong. For specific need he simplest approach may be to use for specific purposes a standalone script. You can solve the problem - apparently - by using Joomla's wrapper feature, and use your scripts as they where part of your Joomla site. Almost perfect solution you may think... but your scripts are directly accessible by their physical URL, not only through the Joomla interface. What you can do about?

  A lot. And surprisingly easily.

• SoBiPro - problems with ItemID in Alphabar

  You might experienced this, the links in the Alphabar are sometimes misbehaving, the module assignments in the resulted pages are gone off, if you have some fancy module to menu associations set in your SoBiPro powered site. Obviously, this is an ItemID handling problem, and, unfortunately can be fixed only with a core hack.

• Submitting content from frontend

  Indeed, what's needed for a user to submit a new content item from the frontend, and how he/she should proceed?

  First of all the user must have the privileges corresponding to the authorization level of "author" or above.

• Turn caching on!

  To improve your Joomla website's performance, just turn on "caching" on the "Cache" tab from Joomla's Global Configuration. When caching is turned on, Joomla creates a static file or "cache" of your website data on the disk. When the static file is found, the system retrieves the data from the disk rather than from the database. This improves performance because it saves system resources by not making redundant SQL calls to the database. And it will also speed up the display time of the pages.

  You can set cache refresh rate in seconds. If you don't constantly update your contents, you might want to set it longer. And to further improve it, go to all your modules configurationand select "yes" to cache option (not available in all modules).

• Using the Page Class Suffix in Template Code

  The Page Class Suffix is a parameter in Joomla! content Menu Items. It is set in the Menu Item: [Edit] screen under the "Parameters (Advanced)" section. This will cause Joomla! to either add a new CSS class or modify the existing CSS class for elements in this specific Menu Item layout.

• What the alias field is for?

  Sometime we are forgotting the very basics when we are thinking about the SEO for our Joomla website. Did you asked yourself this simplequestion:

  What the alias field is for and how to use it to your advantage?

• White death screen on category blog page

  I was sure that ths is an error wich newer come back to me - was a relatively common one in early 2010-s, since dissappeared from my radar. Today one of my former students approached me with his problem. He took over a site running the latest Joomla, and when tried to change the blog list views to category blog views, as the siteowner requested, the respective pages ended up with a white PHP fatal error death screen.

• You are not authorised to view this resource

  Sometimes when you publish a new menu item, and everything seems to be OK, when you try to access the new menu item you just created you hit the wall: instead of the intended content you'll see the following error:

  You are not authorized to view this resource.
  You need to login.

  Even more confusing can be the situation when a link which used to work behaves this way. The target content item is published, access rights are set to Public, and you still got this message! What can be wrong here?