So I've been promising you for several chapters now that we're going to clean up
the way these articles look.
Right now, by default, we have an article title, it links somewhere,
actually it links to itself.
Even if you're not using the Read More functionality, we have a line for an author here;
we have some details listed underneath about the category and the
publication date which is in European format, and the hits that we've gotten
to this particular article.
And I know many of you just want to get rid of all of this stuff, so do I.
So, that's what I am going to cover in this next video is how we can clean up
the way these articles appear.
And there are many different ways that we can do that.
We can do this on an article by article basis, we can do it for an entire menu,
or we can do it globally.
So I am going to start with globally.
Because it's probably true that you want to get rid of as much of the stuff
globally as possible, and then go back to Menus or Articles to make exceptions
to any of the global rules that you will set up.
So I am going to start by going to my back end of Joomla!
and I am going to go to Content>Article Manager, and I am going to click on this
Options button up here.
This is a button that's only available to super administrators and it allows
me to turn on and off the various aspects of the Web page that I want to see or not see.
So first of all, under Articles, I can choose to show the title or not.
If I hide the article title, then I just have text on the page without
the article title present.
That's probably a bad idea for the design that I'm putting together,
so I am going to leave that to Show.
However, I probably don't want those titles linked because they link to themselves.
This work is great on a page like our Solar blog.
Because I can click on the title of the article, and go to the full text of that
article, the same as I can click on the Read More.
But, it really doesn't work on a page like the K-Eco Energy Bulbs.
When I click on that, I am just reloading my Web page.
So it's a little bit frustrating.
So what I am going to do is turn off the Link Titles Globally, and maybe I will
override those later in the Solar blog.
I'm going to show my intro text.
That's the little bit of text that starts off one of our blog posts.
So, if I go to my Solar blog, this tiny little bit of text down here in the
bottom is my intro text, I do want to show that when it's present.
The position of the article info can be Above, or Below or Split, and the
Article Info is this information that's here at the top of the article.
I can choose to show the category or not.
I am going to hide it.
I don't want to link it either.
And scrolling on down a little further, I don't want to show my author, I don't
want to show a publication date.
The navigation refers to, choose one of these articles here, if I go into
the Trend in alternative energy usage, I have two buttons at the bottom of
every article; it's Previous and Next.
And what these do is navigate me through the category of information.
So I can click on these buttons and then read all of the content within a
particular category and when I get to the bottom there's only one Previous Button.
So then, I'll go back through my previous links to go back up to the
first article in that series.
I find those buttons kind of confusing because you don't know what's next.
When somebody explains to you what those buttons do, then they're great.
But, it's likely that most people are going to be looking at your Web site
do not know what those buttons do.
So I just usually choose to turn them off.
That's called navigation for some reason.
I am going to go ahead and turn that off and hide it.
I can choose to show my Read More links or not.
I'm going to Show them.
One of the things that you might have been wondering about is showing the tile
with the Read More link.
So once again, here on my Solar blog page, hit Back a few times here, go back my Solar blog.
What I have here is these Read More links, but it doesn't just say reports.
It says, Read More:
Farmers installing solar power in record numbers and some of you are probably
wondering why that has all of that text there?
Well, search engines tend to weight text that occurs in a link more heavily,
and these Read More items are just links.
And so by putting these extra words including the title in it, we are increasing
the weight of those particular keywords that were used in the title.
Furthermore, if you have a disability of some kind, and you're looking at a blog
whether you have 100 posts on the page, you might have 100 links that all say Read More.
You don't know what each individual Read More link will take you to.
So, by turning off that additional text, you are decreasing the accessibility of
your Web site, and you may be impacting your search engine optimization.
Having said all of that, some people really just want the text that says Read More,
and this is where you would configure that.
So, you might want to show the Read More link, but you don't want to necessarily
show the title with it.
The Read More Limit would put a limit on the number of characters in the
title for the article.
So if you have a very long title, in this case, it only shows the first 100
characters of that title before it cuts it off.
The last part of this is showing the icons, the print icon, the e-mail icon and hits.
So right now on our Web page, we have hits that are located here.
And then we have this funny looking gear icon that occurs over here on the side.
And if you click on the gear icon, what you find located here is a
printer-friendly version of this page, and Email this to a friend.
So, if I was to go to the print version of this page, it comes up in a pop-up
window with everything on the screen, and I can click the Print button to print
off just this article.
The Email to a friend will come up in a window, and I can fill in my e-mail information.
But, there's no way I can put in a block of text or say why I am sending this link.
I would just fill this out, and it would e-mail the link for this particular
article to somebody.
And my sense for these at this point in time is that we don't see a whole lot of
e-mail to a friend anymore on a lot of these Web sites because so many people are
sharing things through social media.
And there doesn't seem to be as much printing going on anymore as there used to
be either, and of course you can always just print these pages off through your
Web browser anyway, or people tend to copy them and paste them into Microsoft
Word if they want to control the way that the page looks when they print it.
So I tend to not want to have these items showing at all.
So you might think that simply by hiding the icons that would be sufficient.
So, I am just going to save so far. So I am just going to hit my Save button here.
All the changes that I've made so far are now saved.
And if I refresh my Solar blog here, you see that my articles are no longer linked.
But, I still have the Hits showing here in the details, and I still have this
dropdown and the icon that's associated with it, with links underneath that
say Print and Email.
Why are they still here?
Well, this Show Icons item only hid the icons next to the words Print and Email.
They did not get rid of the dropdown or the big icon or anything else.
So if you want the Print and the Email options to go away entirely, what you
have to do is Hide the Print icon even though you already hid the icon and you
have to hide the Email icon even though you already hid that as well.
This will actually by setting all three of these to hide, will get rid of those
items on the page altogether.
And of course, we'll want to get rid of hits as well.
So if we go ahead and say Save, and I refresh my page, those details with the
hits are now gone, and the dropdown that showed up over here that had the
Print and Email items on it is also gone.
So, the page looks a little bit better.
It works particularly well here on the Products page where I just want a title
at the top followed by my text.
It works great on the Eco Energy Bulbs page.
But, here under the Solar blog, I may actually want those Linked Titles back
again so that I can click on those.
Maybe I don't want to show the Read More buttons after all, maybe I just like to
have clickable titles where people can click on them to go to the full version,
It would clean up the look a little bit.
Some of you might be wondering about these Read More buttons and their styling,
the fact that they look big, horsey, buttony kind of Read More kind of things,
that's all under control of the CSS. What Joomla! puts out is
just a link text for Read More, so we could change the styling
if we wanted to make those links a little bit more subtle.
But, that's kind of beyond the scope of this course.
So, as we generally look around the site, things are definitely improved by the
global changes that we've made.
But, there might be a few places where we would like to override those settings,
and I'll show you how to do that in the next video.