Create Menus

Once you've mastered creating articles, sections and categories, creating menus should be a breeze. Except maybe for understanding all the types of content and options that are unique to menus.

The first thing to understand is that you can have menus in one or more positions on your web page. The positions can even be different for each page. The content of the menus do not have to be the same either. Example: you might have a multi-level drop down menu at the top of each page with links to everything on your site. Another menu could be on the same page at the bottom of every page that lists only top level items such as “Home”, “About us” and “Site Map”.

The top and bottom menus in the above example are different menus with different names. Each item on the menus are called “menu items”.

Where do you create your new bottom, left-side or right-side menus? The Menu Manager. You can reach the Menu Manager from the administrator control panel by choosing the icon (2^nd from right in bottom row of next image) OR from the top menu “Menus > Menu Manager”.

The next image shows the Menu Manager window.

You probably won't need to add a new menu. At least not until you've worked the default main menu. So we'll skip further discussion of adding new menus and go to how to add and edit items in a menu.

First choose Main Menu from the “Menus” menu of the control panel or if you are at the Menu Manager screen, click on the icon under the “Menu Item(s)” column for the row that lists the menu you want to work with (see above menu).

Let's say you want to add a new article to a new menu. You can't create a menu without first having some type of content that will be displayed when that menu is selected. You're already created your article (I am presuming here) so we're ready to add it to a menu.

First click on the New button in the Menu Item Manager. Its the Green circular button with plus sign (+) in the top row of buttons, 2^nd from the right. See above image.

You will now be able to select the type of content that will be linked to this menu item. Take a look at the next image.

This image only shows a portion of the list of content items that can be linked to menu items. You may have different choices depending on the extensions you have installed for your site. Even for articles you have many choices. The most basic option is to link a single menu item to a single article. For this choose “Article > Article Layout” from the tree view.

There's a lot going on in the Article Layout window. So I've broken it down into sections. You should see the following at the top of the window that has opened.

The left side tells you the Menu Item Type you have chosen. We see that it says we've chosen the “Article Layout” and beneath that it explains that “The Article Layout displays a single Article.” That's what we wanted for this example. There is also a button to Change Type in case that isn't what we wanted.

The top right side under Paramaters (Basic) allows us to select the specific article that will link to this menu. Click on the Select button and choose the article you want for this menu item.

The next section is on the left. It is the Menu Item Details section for the Article Layout.

You must give the Menu item a Title. This is the name that appears in the menu item list. If you don't fill in the Alias field, it will be filled in automatically, otherwise give a short alias for the menu item name.

The Parent Item list shows other menu items in the menu. Choosing anything other than Top will make this new menu item a sub menu to the Parent you have chosen. You can choose the order menu items appear in the menu but that is not done from this window. You must save the configuration for this window first.

Access Level defines who can see the menu item. You can hide menus items from visitors and only display them if someone is a registered user who has signed into your site.

The “On Click Open In” box normally is set to the first option. Choose the second or third option to cause a new window to open when the menu has been selected. Some people use this for displaying forms.

The next section is the second of the three parameter sections on the right. Only one of the three can be expanded at a time. Click on the Parameters (Component) to expand it now. Most of these should follow global defaults and you shouldn't have to worry about them. But if you get PDF and Email icons were you didn't expect them or no icons when you did; or you get two titles (one from the menu and one from the article title), this is where you can fix the problem.

This section is below the Parameters (Component) section. It is important because if you aren't using an extension to manage your page titles and meta information for SEO, then this is where you need to set the page title.

The Page Title is the title that appears in top of your browser window. The title is very important for SEO. Take advantage of it and give every page a unique and descriptive name. Although this will default to the name of your menu item, search engines will use over 60 characters from this title to display on a search engine result page (SERP). The exact number of characters depends on the search engine and whether the title must be truncated because it is too long. But most people have titles that are too short so think carefully about the contents for the title.

Show Page Title radio buttons select whether to show the page title on the web page, not in the top of the window. Set this to No to use the article or menu title (or no title) on the page. The Page title you've given above will still be shown at the top of your browser window.

The Page Class Suffix, Menu Image and SSL Enabled are advanced settings which you probably shouldn't be changing - unless you really understand what you are doing. The Page Class Suffix and Menu Image are template dependent settings. The Class Suffix is a nice way to add custom formatting from your style sheet. To use it your template either has to already support custom suffixes or you have to create your own. Editing CSS is beyond this lesson.