So I'm here on my Press Releases page, I just created this as a category list
in the previous video;
it's not a terribly attractive page.
Nowhere on this page first of all does it say that this is the Press Releases page.
I only know that because I built this Web site and there's this funny little
dropdown up here on the top, it's telling me how many hits are in each one of
my Press Releases, which can be kind of embarrassing if you don't get a lot of
traffic to your site.
The fact that I have one here that has zero hits, it's kind of sad, you think about it.
In fact that these are written by Super User, you probably don't really care
about either, so we need to clean up the look and feel of this a little bit, so
I'm going to show you how to do that now. If you happen to be at the backend of Joomla!
and you go to Menus>Main Menu and I'm going to scroll on down to Press
Releases down here.
The last video we worked on this screen a lot, the Details tab, now I'm going to
switchover to Advanced Options and I'm going to scroll down to the List Layouts
down here on the bottom and I'm going to tweak some of these settings.
So Display Select is this little item right here, the number 10 here, this
dropdown, I really don't want that there, so I'm going to set that to Hide.
The Filter field is actually not displayed by default, but there's a search box
that you can have display here on this page if you wish.
If you have a hugely long list of stuff that might be a very helpful thing to do,
but this is set to be turned off by default, that's the global setting,
so I'm just going to leave that in place.
Table Headings would give you some headings on the top of this, Titles and Hits
and so forth, I don't really want that either, so I'm going to leave that
exactly where it is, I could Show the Dates associated with these articles and
I could do that, but in fact the dates are all exactly the same for this,
so I'm not going to show that either.
And then finally down here Showing the Hits and Showing the Author,
you see those are displayed here.
The Hits over here in the column, the Author is underneath;
I actually don't want any of those at all, so I'm going to Hide those.
And if I just go ahead and hit my Save button, so I can save my changes but keep
this window open for editing, then I'm going to refresh the front end of the
Web site and you'll see that already this page is looking a lot better, a lot
less cluttered, it's just a list of articles, and when I click on these
articles, I can see more information, read the full article and so forth,
so that's looking pretty good.
But it still doesn't say Press Releases on this page, so I need to add that.
Back here again to the back end of Joomla!
back to the Advanced Options for this particular menu item, and if you scroll on
down here, all the way down to Page Display Options, under Page Display Options,
this is where I can customize a few things.
First of all I can change my Browser Page Title.
So right up here in front end of the Web site I went through how you got KinetECO
up there at the top, you did that through the Global Configuration,
I covered that in an earlier video.
Press Releases is the name of the Menu item and that's what's showing up there
on the top of the page.
If I wanted to display something different in that tab, I could type in a
browser page title right here and that would override what's on the top, but
what I really want to show the words Press Releases show up on this page is
the Show Page Heading part of this, so I'm going to set that to Yes and then
I'm going to type in a page heading of Press Releases, and now if I just hit
the Save button again, and I refresh my Press Releases page, you'll see that I
have the words Press Releases up here at the top of the page, so at least now
I have some page identity.
Now the last thing that I might want to add is some introductory text that'll
appear here, between the word Press Releases and a list of all the Press
Releases that show up underneath.
Marketing people love to add a little bit of blah, blah here at the top, because
for some reason they think people read that, I don't think anybody reads that
little bit of text there at the top, I think people just go right to the press
releases, they know what this is, but marketing people frequently want a little
bit of introductory text.
So in your Exercise Files I have included for you a little bit of introductory text.
If you go ahead and highlight that and Ctrl+C or Cmd+C to copy it, we can
put this in and have this appear.
The place that we put it in though is a little bit tricky.
Inside of our menu item under Advanced Options, we have the option for a
Category Description to either show or hide.
By default that category description is hidden, but I'm going to show you where
you can go to put that category description in.
So first off all I'm going to set this Category Description to Show.
All we can do here in the Menu item is set that category description to Show or
Hide, we can't set the category description here.
So once you set that to Show, go ahead and say Save & Close and then I'm going
to go to Content>Category Manager and I'm going to find my Press Releases
category and you probably saw this great big box here, but you didn't know
what to do with it and I didn't tell you back in the category chapter.
Well, here's what you can do with it, you can put in a Description and just like this,
and that Description doesn't necessarily show anywhere unless you're
making something like a Category Blog or Category List and you specify that the
category description should show on the page.
So, now that I've got my introductory text here, if I say Save & Close and
I now refresh the Press Releases page, there's my little bit of text right here
at the top of my Press Releases, and I've got all my links to my articles here listed underneath.
So Category lists are another way of displaying a whole bunch of articles on a single Joomla!
page, you can also do that with blog, which would be a different type of layout,
but they're a great way of introducing a bunch of text in Joomla!
in a compact form and you can, of course, top your category list off with a
nice-looking title, as well as a little bit of introductory text if you wish.