So in our previous video, we created a category blog for our Solar blog.
And this particular blog had about five articles in it and you see that they are
displayed here on this page, four articles I guess.
You see that we've got one big article stretching across the top and then it
seems like we have columns underneath, where we have some additional
articles located here.
And you're probably wondering how we can change this layout.
Fortunately, it's not that awful.
And we can in fact change this layout just using Joomla!'s interface, you don't
have to deal with HTML or CSS or anything like that.
So here in the backend of Joomla!, let's go to Menus>Main Menu one more time.
And we are going to go down to our Solar blog link.
If you go ahead and click on that to edit it, and so far we've only worked here
on the Details tab which allows us to set up the Menu Item Type and the
Category, the name of the Menu Item and so forth.
But notice that there's also an Advanced Options tab.
So if we start by going here, scroll on down to where it says Blog Layout
Options, and you'll see here that we've got four blanks for Leading Articles,
Intro Articles, Columns and Links.
And this is how we can change the layout of our Web page.
So let's take a look at each of these things individually.
Here, inside of a typical blog layout, this is currently set up to have two
columns of information. How do we know?
Well, we've got two columns of information right here, one column and two columns.
So that's the easy one.
Intro Articles indicates these are articles that have a title, a little bit of
text followed by a Read More link.
And we have three of these, these three down here on the bottom,
they are here in the columns.
And then finally, there is one that's on the top that spans across these two
columns that's called the Leading Article.
Finally, we have this thing down here called Links.
I don't have any of those showing right now on the Solar blog because I don't
have enough articles that are assigned to the Solar category just yet.
What the links would indicate is you have a bullet followed by the title of
the article as a link that you can click on and you can then go read the full article.
So it doesn't have the big title the little bit of text on the Read more, it's
just a bullet and the title of the article that you can click on to go read the full article.
By default Joomla!'s settings for this is one Leading Article, four Intro
Articles, two Columns and four Links, that is the numbers that Joomla!
is working with right off the bat.
If we want to change those global numbers, these are globally set, we can change
them on a blog-by-blog basis simply by typing in different numbers here.
So what I would like to start by doing is saying instead of two columns, let's
just have one column.
And instead of having any links at all, they are kind of unattractive and they
are a little bit confusing.
Let's set that to zero.
And then here for my Intro Articles, I usually set this to a big number, like let's say 20.
And the reason why is, that way I'll have a whole bunch of articles appearing on this page.
And if I have more than 20 articles assigned to the Solar category, what will
happen is I will wind up with some navigation on the bottom, a series of numbers
that I can click on to go to more pages of more blog posts.
And then finally for the Leading Articles, this is something that I very seldom
if ever use inside of Joomla!, I am going to go ahead and set that to zero.
So these are the numbers that I typically use for laying out my blogs,
particularly my Category blogs.
I am going to go ahead and click my Save button here, that will keep me in
the editing screen.
And if I refresh my blog, now you can see that I at least have these items
stacked on top of each other, one after the other.
Okay, so one of the things you might want to do is think about the order in
which these are appearing on the particular blog.
Once again if we go to Advanced Options and I go on down here to the Blog Layout Options.
I have some options here for ordering.
And this is here under Category Order and Article Order.
I only have one category, so I'm not going to group together any of my
articles by category.
So I don't need to mess with that, but Article Order, I have some options here
that are worth exploring.
So first of all, I could list my Featured Articles only, I could make this
actually a blog about Featured Articles and I could order those or I could put the
most recent articles first which probably is really what makes sense for my
Solar blog or I could put the Oldest articles first.
I could put them in Alphabetical order or Reverse, in order by Author, in order
by Hits that means in other words how many times somebody has visited a page, so
the most popular pages wind up at the top of a blog, or finally in something
called Article Manager Order.
What is Article Manager Order?
Well, let me show you what that is real quick.
I am going to get out of the screen by hitting my Close button and if I go here
to the Article Manager, I have still got this set to Trashed, so let me reset
that just to select status, here is all of my articles.
What you'll notice right now is that for the most part these are in alphabetical order,
I am not sure why Farmers installing solar powers first, maybe I have a
stray space in front of that.
But for the most part this column is in alphabetical order.
What I would like this to be in is in order by category.
So what I am going to do here is I am going to select like this dropdown over
here where it says Select Category.
And I am going to select just my Solar category, that's all I really want to see.
And this is now showing me all of the articles that I have inside of the Solar category.
And they are still in order by Title here.
And what I could do for example is I could sort these by Author or I could sort
them by Date and this will put them in some order with the oldest one down here
at the bottom and the newest one down here at the top as I have sorted by date.
If I wanted these to be in a different order like some sort of order that I fix,
I can click and drag and drop these.
So click on the little down arrows here in this column and if you click on this
little icon, you can click and drag these and that will reorder your articles,
so that they appear in a very specific order.
Let's say I want Announcing first, followed by the Trend, followed by Farmers,
followed by Embry house, this is the exact order that I want things in.
I could go ahead and do that.
And then what happens is, if I just go to my blog here and refresh, nothing is
going to change in terms of the order because by default, I think this is set to
have the most recent article displaying first.
What I will need to do is go back to Menus>Main Menu, go back to my Solar blog
item and go back to Advanced Options and down under Blog Layout options,
then down here I can change my Article Order to Article Manager Order.
And if I say Save, now when I refresh my blog here, this will reorder to exactly
the order that I have inside of the Article Manager.
So the advantage here is that I can put in my articles in whatever way I want,
but I can order them precisely in the order of what I want them to appear,
right here on my page.
The downside to this is now you have to tell your clients about how they need
to reorder their articles inside of the Article Manager and it's part of the
procedure when they put in a new article and it's an extra step for your clients.
So unless you absolutely positively have to have these articles in a certain
order and ordering them something simple like by Date, putting the most recent
one at the top of the page is not going to work for you, use one of those
methods if at all possible because it will just be easier for your client to
maintain the Web site once you're out of the picture you're done building.
But if you have to order these things in a certain order, the Article Manager
order can be very helpful.
And with that wonderful click-and-drag interface, which is new to Joomla 3.0,
it's relatively straightforward to reorder those articles and then have them
appear here on the Solar blog page.
So what I am going to do now is I am just going to switch this back, I really
don't want this to display an Article Manager Order.
So I am just going to switch this back real quick.
Instead of Article Manager Order, I am going to go back to the Most recent first
and I am going to say Save & Close and now when I refresh my Solar blog, there
we go, this will be the oldest article and it will be down at the bottom,
the Most recent article will be at the top.