If you want to setup a Blog, here is my first advice:
Setup a section like ” Blogging”,”articles” or something alike, then put in that section a categorie like ” Weblog” or “Blogging”.
Please do NOT use a categorie “Blog“… because some SEF components for Joomla take that as a replacement for ” Blogsection or Blogcategory!
And you do want to use a SEF Component, I will tell you later why.
If you are not so familiar with the Joomla content structure, take a look at Understanding the Joomla Content Structure
Now Lets take a look at the first Joomla menu choice if you want to add a new menu item.
The Blog Content category…
If you select this item you are given several options in the sidebar, lets go over them and see what they mean.
First you have the Option #leading:
This is set to one, which means the just one article is posted in the top section of the page.
Then there is the option #intro:
This shows the number of articles that will be visible below the leading part and is depended of the next value, the Columns, so here they are split into two columns
Attention! The number of #leading and the number of #intro items are added together, so in this case you have a total of 5 articles on you blog page!
#links is the number of links to other articles in the category that will be shown below the other articles and these are shown as links with the text of the title as link.
Category en primary order are there to change the order of the articles if you wish to.
You can use the drop-down selections to take your pick for your favorite ordering.
For a real Blog you could set these to the default, that means the newest first.
Pagination is the way Joomla shows that there are more articles in this categorie and you can go through them bij going through the pages.
Below you can see how this works out in the layout of the Blog categorie page created by this menu choice:
As you can see, this standard layout is not always the most practicle…
If you like to have more articles on your Blog starting page, then you are better off going for 1 Column en a higher number of #leading articles.. so if you want to layout your own favorite page layout, experiment with these setting until you are satisfied with the results.
You will see, it’s fun to learn how to Blog with Joomla!
Technorati Tags: Blog, Blog Layout, blogging, , Joomla, Joomla Blog,
i followed these instructions and for some reason i cannot get more than 3 posts on my front page at a time. i want to put all of my article links on the front page. And I can’t get rid of the pagination. I am using the rhuk solarflare. Is it a restriction of the template? I want to have the left available for modules and then have articles in two rows going all the way down and then some.
@John
I did some testing, but every thing works fine with the template, so no issue there.
If you made a blogging section for you articles and created a menu link, then move the link up to the top of the main menu.
That means that is really in the first position above the standard Home…
Now look if the site brings up that blogsection first, this way you won’t have to assign all the articles to the frontpage.
I suggest you use the following options:
- leading = 0
- Intro = 20
- Colums = 2
- Links = 0
This way you get 2 colums with each 10 posts, no leadin articles and no article links in the bottom.
It depands on how large your posts are if you use more or less intro items.
Don’t make it to long, visitors won’t scroll on a very large slow loading page…
If you want your readers (and search engines) to be able to read the previous posts you have to leave pagination on, otherwise they can only reach older posts be a sidemap or gategory links.
P.s You can always name that top blogsection menu item “Home”
hi!
i can not find layout showed on first image (joomla-blog-menu-parts.jpg).
is this some kind of component, or it’s integrated in joomla?
tnx i adv!!!
@Nikola: It is a standard layout screen that came from a Joomla 1.x version.
Joomla 1.5.x has the same parameters, just add a menu link and choose for Blog Layout and you will see the paremeters on the riight site were you can edit it to your liking.
tnx Hummerbie, but how to access it? i can not find in anywhere
i must be blind or something
)
please help!
hi
is there an option to reverse the order of leading and intro? or even..
leading
intros
leading
if you can spot out for me where and how to hack the default layout, please let me know
with thanks
@nicola, sorry I missed your question before, you need to create a new menu item from the administrator panel, menu, mainmenu (or other menu you choose) then choose articles, categories, then you will get the layout options.
@hubba: if you want to change something like that you need to hack the Joomla core files like index.php file and many others, which is never a good idea since you need to do that over and over again with every update of Joomla!.
You should look at template builders like rockettheme, joomlart or special components like iJoomla news or Joomla Magazine. All of them will have some kind of solution for your question without the need of php hacking
Thanks for reply and I will take a look.
Take care.
Hubba
Hi,
on my site i am able to get theblog layout ,but how can i put comment option to visiters.
Let me know the procedure to put comment option on my category blog layout in my site
Thank you,
Bharath