To separate your Blog form the rest of your Joomla based website, you should give it his, of her, own Menu module.
To do this you simply create a new Menu Module.
You can do this by going into your Administrator panel and choose Menu -> Menu Manager, you now see als the menu’s that are already in the system.
Click new, and Fill the two fields with the text of your choice, but please don’t use just Blog ! because this could get you into problems with some Sef components…
If you think your done, think again… the module is created, but not active yet.
You need to publish the module via the Module menu, Site Modules that is also where you decide to give it a place on your Site front-end.
As you can see, there are several options for you menu, just like all the other menu options.
From here on it is your choice on how to put the categories in from you Blogging section.
You did create a Blog section and categories? Otherwise read the beginning of the Blog categorie post again.
Create tables, or Blog layouts, within the menu as you see fit, but please be consistent enough for you site visitors!
Starting with you Blog section on the Frontpage
What if you really just want to use Joomla for Blogging… you don’t want to start with the standard Frontpage!
No, you want to show your your Blogging section and the latest Blog content from different categories, wouldn’t that be great?
And it is possible, with just one menu item, in the main menu…
Create a new menu item in the Main menu and link it to a Blog section choice, select all the Blogging categories to show and set the layout values you want to use.
Now move the just created menu item up the menu ladder until it is in first position , above Home!
Check the preview of your site and see how Joomla uses the First item in the main menu to start your site with…
You Blog section just as you wanted it.
For your menu, you get something like the menu below, where your visitors can directly go to their Blog category of intrest.
Hello,
This post references utilizing different layouts in joomla. Unfortunately—regardless of my current efforts—I cannot find any information on creating alternate joomla layouts.
My home page layout needs to be different from the internal layouts. For example the home page will have two colums: left 60% width and right 40% width, while the inner pages will have a menu and other elements to the left (30%) and content to the right (70%). Is this possible?
Thanks in advance!
Danny
@Daniel
It is pretty simple once you know it :-)
Just create a seperate template for you frontend, or copy and modify your current one.
Install it and check if it works the way you want it.
Now go back into your template manager and set your default template for the rest of the site.
Then click the checkbox on you homepage template and choose “asign” in the upperleft icon section.
Here you can choose the template to be used in all the menu links reffering to “Home” link, mostly in the Main menu and in the topmenu.
Test it, it should work, just make sure to use the same module positions on both templates.
Using ans assigning modules can also be a choise to do this, but there is less flexibility with this option.
Hope this helps!
[...] First you have to create a menu item that holds your section, or the categories like you did in Creating your Blog Menu [...]