Joomla cho người mới bắt đầu part 16 pdf

Chapter 6
[ 157 ]
Pop quiz – test your site article expertise
1. The arcle editor screen in Joomla! allows you to do which of these three things?
a. Formang arcle text.
b. Inserng images.
c. Controlling the start and end date of publishing.
2. What's the use of the Joomla! Media Manager?
a. It allows you to manage all sorts of media (images, movie les, and
MP3 les).
b. It allows you to upload images and insert them into an arcle.
c. It allows you to insert images that come with the default
Joomla! installaon.
3. You open an exisng arcle in the Joomla arcle editor and see a red doed line.
What does that mean?
a. Text below the line will not be displayed.
b. The arcle text has exceeded the maximum number of characters allowed.
c. If needed, Joomla! can separately display the intro text and the full
arcle text.
4. How can you break a long arcle into a series of short ones?
a. By manually creang several individual arcles.
b. By entering page breaks in an arcle.
c. By entering Read more links in an arcle.
5. What's the funcon of archiving arcles?
a. Archived arcles cannot be edited any more.
b. Archived arcles aren't displayed in the frontend.
c. Archived arcles are displayed in a special Archive part of the frontend.
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Creang Killer Content: Adding and Eding Arcles
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Summary
In this chapter, you've mastered creang arcle content. This is what we covered:
 To create new arcles or to edit exisng ones, the Arcle Manager is your starng
point. From there, click on New or select an arcle and click on Edit.
 The arcle eding screen allows you to style your contents and add images. If
you want more text eding control, you can set the text editor to show an extra
("Extended") set of buons.
 The Media Manager allows you to create new image folders. This way, you can keep
the image les on the web server organized.
 There are several ways to display arcle content. It can be one connuous text page,
but you can also split the arcle into an introductory text and the actual arcle body
text.
 To break a long arcle into several interlinked subpages, you add p age breaks to the
arcle text. In the backend you've sll got one arcle, in the frontend it will display
as a series of pages.
You've now mastered the recipe that enables you to create as much killer content as you like.
But all of the beauful site content that may be accumulang in your secons and categories
is useless if your site visitors fail to noce it's there. So, it's me to focus on your site's "shop
windows": the home page and other pages that draw your visitors' aenon to the content.
In the next chapter, you'll learn how to create an inving home page and alluring overview
pages; give visitors an irresisble preview of what your site has to oer.
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7
Welcoming Your Visitors:
Creating Attractive Home Pages and
Overview Pages
In the previous chapters, you've laid the ground work for your site. First, you
created content containers (secons and categories), then, you created actual
content (arcles). You've got a bunch of neatly organized, aracve arcles

ready to be explored by a worldwide web surng audience. But how can you
ence those casual web surfers to actually read all that valuable content? Why
would they bother to drill down the content of your site?
That's where the home page and overview pages come in. The home page lures
your visitors in; Joomla!'s overview pages—"second level home pages" that
provide a quick overview of secon and category contents—direct people to the
arcles they could be interested in.
In this chapter we will:
 Customize the home page sengs
 Create a dierent kind of home page
 Create and tweak secon and category overview pages
 Create dierent layouts for dierent types of overview pages
So, let's start tweaking the SRUP home page!
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Welcoming Your Visitors: Creang Aracve Home Pages and Overview Pages
[ 160 ]
Up to now, you've set up the home page and and overview pages using the default opons.
But you might have noced that Joomla! oers dozens of parameters for these page types.
Changing these parameters (sengs) can completely alter the way content is presented. In
fact, dierent sengs can create very dierent looking pages.
Let's eecvely welcome your visitors and ence them to read all of your valuable
content—enter the magic world of home page and overview pages. In the following
screenshots, you'll see what page types we're talking about. On the le-hand side is
the example home page in the default Joomla! installaon, on the right-hand side is
an overview page showing contents of the News category:
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Chapter 7
[ 161 ]

Why do you need overview pages, anyway?
Typically, Joomla! will lead your site visitor to a secon or category content in three steps.
Between the Main Menu and the actual content, there's a secondary page to show secon
or category contents:
1. A visitor clicks on a
menu link.
2. They are taken to
an overview page
with arcle previews
and links.
3. They click to read the
full arcle.
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Welcoming Your Visitors: Creang Aracve Home Pages and Overview Pages
[ 162 ]
As you can see, what's on the home page and the overview pages (and how it's presented) is
vitally important to your site. It's the teaser texts, images, and hyperlinks on these pages that
lead your visitor to the actual content.
Of course, people don't always arrive at your site via the home page. Search engine results
might take them directly to any page—including overview pages. One more reason to make
those pages as encing as you can!
Overview page, landing page, secondary home page?
Joomla! doesn't have a name for overview pages. Among web builders they're
also known as secon start pages, category pages, department pages, or
landing pages. Whatever you like to call it, it's the same thing: a navigaonal
page that provides an overview of site categories. In this book we'll call them
secon or category overview pages.
Creating the perfect home: Mastering home page layout
The main content area in any Joomla! home page is driven by the Front Page Component—it's

the thing that tells Joomla! what to display in the main content area (the mainbody) of the
home page. When you've installed Joomla! with the sample data, the home page mainbody
will show:
 One introductory arcle text over the full width of the mainbody
 Four intro texts divided into two columns
 A list of links to other arcles
You can see this in acon in the screenshot at the beginning of this chapter.
This default setup is suited for many types of content rich sites. But you're certainly not
limited to using this one combinaon of intro texts and links in the home page mainbody.
Joomla!'s Front Page Component oers you a vast amount of choices on how to display
content in it, and what to display.
Changing the way your home page is arranged
It's your client on the phone, telling you that—happy as they are with their new site—some
SRUP sta members nd the home page layout too distracng. They don't like the newspaper
look that displays the content columns in dierent widths. Would you be so kind as to tone
things down a lile? If you could quickly show them an alternave layout, that would be ne.
You hang up and dive into the Front Page sengs.
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Chapter 7
[ 163 ]
Time for action – rearrange the layout of articles on the
home page
You decide to rearrange the items on the Front Page. Let's say you want a maximum of two
intro texts, both in just one column. Apart from this, you would like to show a few hyperlinks
to other arcles that could be of interest to visitors browsing the home page.
1. Navigate to Menus | Main Menu. In the Menu Item Manager, click on Home to
edit the sengs of the home page.
2. In the Parameters (Basic) secon, the default view sengs are shown. There's 1
leading (full width) intro text, 4 intro texts are shown in 2 columns, and there are

4 hyperlinks. If we want a single column on the front page, we'll set the number of
intros and columns to zero. Change the values as follows: set # Leading to 2, # Intro
to 0, Columns to 0, and # Links to 4.
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Welcoming Your Visitors: Creang Aracve Home Pages and Overview Pages
[ 164 ]
3. Click on Preview to see the changes on the frontend. There are now two full-width
intro texts. Because up to now only three arcles have been assigned to the home
page, beneath the two intro texts just one arcle link is displayed. When you'll assign
more arcles to the home page, this list will grow to a maximum of four hyperlinks.
The previous two screenshots show the home page before and aer. The updated home
page on the right-hand side features the same four arcles presented dierently in just one
column. Instead of four intro texts, the new page shows two intro texts and two hyperlinks.
What just happened?
The Parameters of any menu item allows you to inuence the looks of the hyperlink's
desnaon page. In this case, you've tweaked the Home Menu Item sengs to change
the contents of the home page mainbody. The magic numbers of the Parameters (Basic)
are really powerful as dierent values can completely change the way content is displayed.
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Chapter 7
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Have a go hero – tweak the home page settings to your liking
Joomla! oers you a long list of other sengs you can use to adjust the home page layout.
Navigate to Menus | Main Menu | Home and have a look at Parameters (Advanced). First,
you will probably want to set Paginaon to Hide. That way, you'll hide the paginaon links
(< Start Prev Next Last >) that Joomla! displays when there are more arcles available than
can be shown on the home page as intro texts. Showing these links on a home page seems
suited for web log home pages, where visitors expect to be able to browse through possibly

long lists of blog entries. On other types of sites, web users aren't likely to expect mul-page
home pages.
Unwanted Paginaon Links can be set to Hide in the menu link's Parameters
(Advanced) secon.
Have a look at the Parameters (Component) to further customize the home page output.
These parameters allow you to hide arcle details, such as Author Name, Created Date and
Time, and Modied Date and Time. On a website that's maintained by just one or a few
authors, or a website that isn't updated regularly, you might want to hide that informaon.
In this image, the Parameters (Component)
are set to show arcle details, such as the
author name and creaon date.
Hiding unnecessary arcle details reduces "arcle
cluer": images and details that may distract the
reader. There's more room for actual content in
the same space.
On a home page you'll probably also want to hide all of the special funcon icons (set Icons,
PDF Icon, Print Icon, and E-mail Icon to Hide). It's unlikely that visitors want to print or
e-mail parts of your home page content—let alone create a PDF document of part of the
home page.
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Welcoming Your Visitors: Creang Aracve Home Pages and Overview Pages
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Without paginaon and arcle details, the home page looks similar to the following
screenshot. It's a clean looking page, focusing on just two arcle intro texts without any
distracng irrelevant informaon, links, or buons. Less is more: the result is a simple but
appealing home page without too many intro texts or details.
Adding items to the Front Page
In the More Arcles … hyperlink list of your home page, just one hyperlink is shown. That's
because only three arcles are set to display on the Front Page. To add some more, navigate

to Content | Arcle Manager. Add any arcle by clicking on the red cross in the Front Page
column to the right-hand side of the arcle tle. The cross changes to a green check mark.
In the following example, we've selected a News item (SRUP Magazine Looking for Authors)
to be featured on the Front Page:
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