KinetECO collaborates with a number of different agencies, and companies, and
institutions, and nonprofits that specialize in solar and wind energy,
and they'd like to include a page on this Web site that shows some of the links
to these institutions where they're collaborating.
So I would like to add another link to this page that would be called Links,
and I'd like to classify those links into solar links, and wind links, and
fortunately, Joomla
comes with a component that does exactly that.
So I'm going to go ahead and install that now.
I am going to hop in to the back-end of Joomla
here, and I'm going to go to Components > Weblinks.
And as you see here, just as we saw with the regular old Content in Joomla,
just as we saw with Contacts, in our Weblinks, we also have Categories, and then
we have the Links themselves.
And then of course, we're going to have to link whatever we create here in the
component to the menu.
So we're going to follow the same procedures we've been following for our
Content, and our Contacts.
First, we're going to make our Weblinks categories, then we're going to put in
the links, and then we'll link it all up to the menu.
So, here from Weblinks, I am going to start with Categories, and I am going
to start by making a category. Clicking the New button, I'll give this a
Title; Solar Links.
And that's really all I need to put in. There are some other options that are
here, but that's pretty much it, and I am going to say Save & New, and I'm going
to make one called Wind Links, and Save & Close.
So now I have two categories for my links.
Next thing I want to do is actually make my Web links.
So over here on the left side of the page, I am going to click on the Web Links
link, or you can go through the dropdown menus to get there.
And of course, I have no links to start with, so I am going to go ahead and
hit the New button.
And in your Exercise Files, I have given you four links here that we can link to.
So, the first piece of information I am asked for here in Web Links is the Title.
So I am going to copy this; Sun Pacific Solar Electric, Inc.
I will go ahead and paste that in.
Then it's going to ask me for the URL.
Well, that's going to be sunpacificsolar.net. Copy that, paste that here, and my
Category is going to be Solar Links.
That's all I need to put in.
I am going to go ahead and say Save & New.
I am going to repeat this process for California Solar, and then I am going
to repeat the process for my Wind Links, and the change that I will make there
is that I'll indicate that the Category is for Wind Links instead of for Solar links.
I am going to go ahead and do that now.
I will see you on the other side.
Okay, I've just put in my last link here, and now I'm going to hit Save & Close,
and I'm returned to the Web Link Manager, where I have my four links.
I have two of these that are classified under Solar, and I have two that are
classified under Wind.
Now I am ready to display this on the front-end of the Web site.
So to do that, I'm going to go to Menus > Main Menu > Add New Menu Item, and I'm
going to create a Menu Item Type.
And of course, I'm working with the Weblinks component, so I will look under
Weblinks, and I have three choices here.
I can list all of the Web link categories, or the Web links within a category, and
the third option is I can submit a form, so that somebody could submit other
Weblinks to the Web site.
I want to go with listing all the Web link categories.
Because I have two categories, I'd like people to start by looking at what those
categories are, and then choosing a category, which will take them to a page which
will have the links on it.
So I am going to go ahead and choose that.
My top level category here is, where would I like to start listing all of the
categories as part of this?
So, Root would be the top level, and children of that would be Solar Links, and
Wind Links. Or I could say something like Solar Links, if I had a series of
subcategories; for example, maybe I have a subcategory called solar panels,
maybe configured for large solar panels, like the ones that we had on the farms,
versus the smaller solar panels that charge batteries.
So I might have some subcategories under Solar; might have some
subcategories under Wind.
I don't at the moment.
I'm just going to go with Root.
Then I am going to give this a Menu Title; that will be Links. And there are
some other options that are here, but that's really all I need to configure for
the moment, and I am going to go ahead and say Save & Close.
Now when I go to the front-end of the Web site, and I hit Refresh, I have a
link for links, and if I click that, I go to a page that has my Solar Links, and my Wind Links.
If I click on Solar Links, I have my two links that are listed here.
And if I go back to my Links page, I go to my two Wind Links.
So, I'm not really thrilled with the way these pages look, and I'd like to alter
some of the settings that I have here.
The other thing that I'd like to change is that my Links link is last on list,
because it's the most recent one that I created.
I'd like Contact to be the last link in the list here.
So I'd like it to read Home, About, News & Info, Products, Links, and Contact.
So while I'm here inside of the Menu Manager, let me rearrange that.
So I am going to scroll on down here to the bottom of the page, grab my Links
link and drag and drop it just above Contact, and that should rearrange these on the page.
If I refresh my page here, now you can see that Links is listed before Contact.
So now I am going to work on the design of this page.
So, if I go back to Components > Weblinks, I am going to go to my Options item
here at the top of the page.
And something I haven't pointed out to you yet, you might have seen this in some
of the other videos where I worked with Options. Over here in the left
column, you'll see that Joomla
has now lined up all of these Options screens.
Obviously, they are scattered throughout Joomla
for configuring options on an item by item basis, so we have menu options, and we
have Web link options, we have contact options, we have article options.
This particular screen, once you get into one of these options, has the navigation
to go switch between all of the option screens over here on the left side.
That's a new interface in Joomla! 3.
It's particularly helpful when you're configuring ACL, Access Control Lists, which
I'll be doing in a future video.
So, here are some options that I can change here within my Weblinks.
I can set where I'd like these Weblinks to open.
So right now, they're set to open in the same window.
And earlier, where I talked about linking to an external Web site, I said,
pick one; open in the same window, or open in the new window, but always
make the behavior the same.
I had open my other external link in a new window; I'm going to do the same here,
so I'm going to say open in a new window.
Note that we also have choices of a pop-up window, or a modal window.
A modal window is the one that opens up that has the screen that's grayed out in the background.
So I am going to say open in a new window.
It can count the number of clicks each particular link has gotten, and we can
have an icon, or text, or something displaying next to each Web link.
I actually don't want anything, so I'm going to say just the Web link, thank you!
And of course, you can specify what icon you'd like.
I am going to go ahead and say Save.
And if I refresh my Links page, now I have just my two links that are here.
Although, it's still showing the hits, it's still showing the display page, and
it's still showing this filtering box,
so I'd like to change some of that.
So here under Category, it gives me some options for changing a few things.
This particular layout here has to do with the top level links page.
So if I go to the List Layouts, I can make some changes here, and this applies
to my list of Web links that I have here.
So I am going to turn some things off. I am going to turn off the Display Select,
I am going to turn off the Hits as well,
and I could describe my links; that was one of the options that I had.
I didn't put any link descriptions, so you can show or hide those as you wish.
I am going to go ahead and say Save.
And now when I refresh the Links page, now I just have my links here.
My Hits are still showing here in the right-hand column,
so let me just double-check, and make sure that I turn those Hits off.
I am going to go back here to the back-end of Joomla,
and I'm going to go back to List Layouts, and indeed, Hits is set to Hide here
in this particular configuration,
but they're still showing here on the front-end of the Web site.
So this looks like a bug in this version of Joomla.
Hopefully, by the time you watch this video, that bug will have been fixed.
You can always hide any of the elements that you don't want to see on these
pages through CSS if the interface is not quite working correctly.
So that's how we add some more links to our Web site.