Video Transcript

Hi, I am Robert Vining, and this is another JoomlArt training video. Today we're going to take a look at Joomla 1.6 and focus on the front-end modules.

Modules Overview

Joomla 1.6 comes with a built-in Module Manager to easily manage various types of modules for both back-end and front-end.

You can access the Modules Manager from quick icons or from the drop-down Extensions menu. Joomla 1.6 comes with various types of modulus such as content, menus, advertising, links, search and login.

The administration section allows you to filter modules by site or administrator, publish state, position, module type, access and language. The toolbar allows you to create, edit, duplicate, publish or unpublish, check-in and trash modules. Modules that have been edited by lower level users can be checked in by superusers as they have properly saved each module.

Modules Management

Let's click the New button. A window will pop up to display a list of all modules installed in your Joomla website. These are the module types supplied by default with the Joomla distribution package, just enough for you get started publishing your website in no time.

Third-party content modules provide better presentation such as animated effects or various stage settings. To select a module type, just click one on the list and for example let's select Articles category module type. This module type provides various options to display article links from a category. As you can see, we selected Joomla category.

The new filter feature provides include or exclude methods so you can filter articles by featured, category, author, date and even article ID. There are some ordering options such as by title, article ID, creation / modified / publishing date, author or hits and descending or descending.

Another new feature is the Article Grouping options. You can group your article links by author, year, month or category then you could set a grouping direction and finally set a format for the month and year.

The Display Options allows you to set the header level, show or hide the date, hits, author, intro text and Read more.. link. Now let's set a module position and publish the newly created module. We'll use the position-7 of the Beez template. Click the Save & close button when finished editing.

Let's refresh our front-end. Any newly-created module is assigned to all menu items by default, but you can edit the module and change that. On development stage you should set special access level for your modules so you can preview before publishing them. If the module doesn't fit your needs you can just unpublish it or trash it for later use.

The best way to change the order of appearance for your modules within a position is to make use of the Ordering feature. Here's a quick How-to. Click the Ordering table header. Notice the blue arrows? Now you can just click the up-and-down arrows to change the order of appearance.

Let's move the About Joomla! module just below This site module. Click the up arrow for This site module and the page will automatically refresh with the module ordering. OK! Let's check the front-end. The modules have been reordered.

Modules Showcase

Joomla 1.6 comes with lots of module types so let's go ahead explore each of them. We're going to have a closer look at the options for each specific type.

Let's start with the Archived Articles module type. All content articles, which present no real interest to your visitors can be archived. This means that they'll still be published, but they're not listed in the category pages. You can set the number of months to list the archived articles from.

The Advanced Options tab allows you to set some layout and cache settings.

The Articles Newsflash module type provides a very basic way to show your latest articles on other pages than the home page. You can select a category to display articles from, show or hide article images, article title, set the title to be linkable, set the header level, show the Read more.. link, set the number of articles to be shown and ordering options. The ordering feature also provides a randomize option.

The Related Articles module type allows you to display articles that are related by keywords while browsing the content article page. This module only has the option to show or hide the article creation date, along with the layout control and cache options.

The Categories module type allows you to show subcategory links of a parent category.

It's a useful way to provide handy navigation for category pages with deep structure. As you can see, you can select the parent category, show or hide the category description, and set the depth of the category shown.

The Advanced Options panel allows you to set the layout, cache and also a heading level.

The Articles - Most read module type can be used to display the most popular articles on your site. You can set to display the featured articles, set the number of articles to be displayed and select a category of articles to display items from.

The Advanced Options provide same layout control and cache options.

The Banners module type allows you to display banners from the Banners Component.

You can set the target for the banner links, set how many banners to load, select the client, select a banner category, match keywords for search pages and set the behavior of the randomize feature. Additionally you can set a header text and a footer text.

The Breadcrumbs module type displays a pathway for your website to make navigation easy on large websites.

As you can see you have the option to show or hide a short pretext You are here, show or hide the Home link, customize the text for the Home link and show or hide the title of the current page. You can also set a separator character.

Here some examples. The Custom HTML module type gives you full control over the content layout and design. It gives you the option to enable content plug-ins and integrates TinyMCE editor for easy editing. The Feed Display module type allows you to display external content. You could set the feed URL, text direction, and show or hide the feed title, description, images and number of feed items. Additionally you can set to show or hide the item description or intro text and set a word count.

The Footer module type can display copyright information.

You can only set Advanced Options for layout control and cache.

The Language Switcher module type allow your users to switch the language for your website. This means that you need to install and configure additional language packs for the front-end. We'll cover that in a future video. You can set a pre-text to instruct users on how to switch the language and also a post-text for further notices like Available languages: Spanish, French, etc.. Additionally you can set to use image flags for your languages.

The Latest Users module type will display a short list of users that have just registered on your website. You could set how many users to display and set links to the profiles or contact pages.

The Login module type allows your registered users to log into your website. You can set a pre-text and post-text, a redirection after login and after log out. While logged in, they'll be shown greetings and their full name or username. You can also encrypt the login form as a security measure.

The Who's online module allows you to inform your visitors about guests and logged in users browsing your site. You can set to show logged in users and/or visitors and also you can enable links to the registered users' contact pages or their profiles.

The Menu module type allows you to publish menus to make navigation handy. You can select the menu you have configured in the Menu Manager, set a start and an end level for rendering the menu and set the show the sub-menu items.

Here the Advanced Options provide the same layout control and cache options, but additionally you can set a menu class suffix and a position for pop-up messages. Hovering the parameters you'll see some hints on usage.

The Random image module type allows you to display images from your images folder. You can set the images format to be loaded, images folder, link and force a custom width or height. The Search module type allows your front end users to easily find content on your website.

This module allows you to set a box label, the width of the box, the box text, show or hide the search button, the button position, a button image, a button text and an ItemID value to show modules assigned to this menu item on the search page results.

The Statistics module type shows statistics for your website such as: server information, site information, hit counter, and a box to increase the hit count if you choose.

The Feed display module type allows you to provide a feed link for your website content. This panel allows you to set the item text and feed format: RSS 2.0 or Atom 1.0.

The Weblinks module type allows you to share resources to your readers.

You can select the weblinks category, set a number of links to display, set the ordering, target window, follow or no-follow and you have the possibility to show description of the web links.

The Wrapper module allows you to display external content on your website. You can set the URL of the external page, auto add http:// URL prefix, set the scroll bars, width and height, auto-high if possible and the target name.

Joomla 1.6 Module video by JoomlArt