A few videos ago we put a piece of content in for the News & Information page of
the Web site and that News & Information page looks like this right now.
It just says this is the News & Information page.
It's not terribly interesting.
What I'd really like to do with this News & Information page is actually not
display what I have here at all.
What I'd prefer to do is, I would like to display a selected group of postings,
maybe some from the Solar blog and some from press releases, but I don't want to
display every single article from Solar blog and every single article from Press
Releases on this top level News & Information page.
I just want to feature the few things that are most current, most important,
most sizzling hot kind of things. So what can I do to make that happen?
Well, remember the featured article option within Joomla!
We took one of the articles that we just put in to the Article Manager and we
called it a featured article it showed up on the home page of the Web site.
Well, those featured articles we can use here for the News & Information page
and what we can say is, we would like featured articles from certain parts of
the Solar blog and Press Releases to show up here on the News & Information page
and not any featured articles from other categories like that uncategorized post
that we had originally put up on the home page.
So I am going to walk you through how to do that now.
First of all, we're going to pop back here into the back end of Joomla!
and I am going to go to Menus>Main Menu, and I am going to go down here to my
News & Information page.
Right now I have this set up as a link to a Single Article.
If I just click on this link, I can change my Menu Item Type simply by clicking
on the Select button here and choosing something different.
So under Articles this time what I'd like to do is I'd like to do something with
Featured Articles and as you see here it shows all the Feature Articles from one
or multiple categories in a single- or multi-column layout.
Now that's exactly what I want.
So I am going to go ahead and choose that and my screen is going to
reconfigure itself.
And now what I can do is take a look at my Advanced Options and here in my
Advanced Options I can choose exactly which categories I'd like to have
displayed as part of these Featured Articles.
So I'm going to click here in the box and I'm going to select Solar and I am
going to select Press Releases and I'm going to deselect all categories, because
I only want to show any featured articles that are located inside of Solar and
located inside of Press Releases.
Further down here on the page is the four boxes I discussed back in the category
blog video where I talked about leading articles, introductory articles,
columns, and links, and I am just going to type in my magic numbers here.
0 for my leading articles, 20 intro articles, 1 column, and 0 links, and
I explained why in that previous video why I chose those numbers.
I am going to pretty much leave it just like this.
So I'm going to go ahead and say Save & Close, and now if I come back here to
the Web site what I am going to do is am going to click back to the Home page
I and then I am going to go back to the News & Information page that will make
sure that link is refreshed and right now on my News & Information page I have
absolutely nothing. Why?
Well, I haven't specified any of those articles to be featured on this page and
that's why I don't have any posts at the moment.
So I am going to go in back here to my Content>Article Manager and I am going to
sort this all by Category.
So let's just take a look at just the Solar category to start with and let's
say that I'd like to feature the K-Eco Mini Panels and let's say I'd like to
feature the farmers here.
Then I am going to switch over to the Press Releases category and let's say
I just want to feature here the Wind turbine farm in Bakersfield.
So I have picked three articles here from my Solar blog category and from my
Press Releases category and now if I go to my News & Information page and
I refresh this, you'll see that I have these articles and they are posted here
and just those three articles.
So I have my two articles on Solar, my one article from Press Releases.
In terms of the ordering here, I can change the way these are ordered on the
Web site and the way that I do that is if I go back to Menus>Main Menu and I go
back to News & Information and under the Advanced Options, a little bit further
down here the Category Order is the first thing to take care of.
So right now it's either in no particular order or it's an Alphabetical order
or Reverse Alphabetical order or Category Manager Order.
I'm actually going to set this to No Order that's because I don't want things
sorted by category, but I could group things together by category in this page.
So say list all the Solar blog entries first followed by all of the
Press Release entries. I could do that.
In this case, I have set it No Order and what that's going to mean is I am just
going to be sorting by articles and the order that the articles appear.
And perhaps, what I will do for Article Order as I'll say just Most recent first.
Then that way the most recent item is at the top of the page regardless of
what category it's in. That works quite well.
It's possible that these articles actually won't rearrange, but we'll see
here in just a minute. We'll go ahead and say Save & Close.
They are already in that order that would be why they would not rearrange.
So I will hit Refresh and in fact these articles didn't rearrange.
So what that indicates to me is I probably put in my press release articles
first when I was entering all the content into the Content Management System
and then I put in these Solar articles probably in that order.
That's why these did not rearrange, but if you would like to maintain that order
so that you have your most recent article at the top use those settings that
I just showed you and that will make sure that the most recent article appears at
the top of the page.
The last thing that I need to add to this is I definitely need something at the
top that says News & Information, because I'm missing that right now.
So one more time I am going to hop back into the News & Information link and I'm
going to go to Advanced options and if I just click on these words up here at
the top called Layout Options, this will collapse the screen so that I can
easily jump on down here to the Page Display Options and I'm going to say Show
the Page Heading and that page heading will be News & Information.
And I'll say Save & Close and now when I refresh this page, I have my title here
of News & Information.
So things are looking pretty good here on the news page.
Let's see what's going on at the home page.
So now here I am on the home page and those three or four articles that I chose
as Featured Articles or the three that I chose as Featured Articles are now
showing up here on the home page as well and I just really wanted to have on the
home page just this little bit of text about the Harnessing wind and sun for a
cleaner, energized planet.
I don't want to have these other articles showing up on the home page.
So first of all why did they show up here and then second of all how can I get rid of them.
Well, why they showed up here is because the home page is by default a
featured item blog.
Exactly the same thing that we just set up for the News & Information page and
the Featured Item blog by default is set up to show all of the featured items
from all of the categories everywhere on the Web site.
So this is showing our News & Information pages here or our Solar blog pages and
our Press Release pages from underneath News & Information as well as this
individual article in the home page.
Now there's two ways that I could solve this problem.
One, I could go into the link for the Home page and I could say the only
category I want to have show up on the Home page is the Uncategorized category
or I could change my menu item type for the home page from that featured blog to
just linking to a single article. So which is best?
Well, it depends.
Do I anticipate ever needing to put any additional content on the homepage?
Could I do it all through one article?
Is there an advantage to having the abilities to add these additional
articles to the home page?
All of that is definitely debatable.
But I think what I am going to do just to make things simple is I am going to
switch my Home page menu Item Type to a Single Article so I'll just show this
single article on the homepage.
So I am going to go back to my back end of Joomla!
and I am going to go to my Home page link.
As I was saying here under Advanced Options this is currently showing all categories.
I could just change this Select Categories to just show the Uncategorized
category and then I would show my one link on the home page.
That's one possible solution.
The other possible solution is what I am going to do now.
Under Details I'm going to click my Select button and I'm going to go to
Articles and I am just going to pick a single article.
That's really all I need.
And my single article will be my home page article.
So this Harnessing wind and sun for a cleaner planet, and I am just going to go
ahead and say Save & Close.
Now when I come back to the home page and I hit Refresh, I have my Single
Article again right here on the home page.
My News & Information page though still has those particular
News & Information articles.
So I have successfully used the featured article functionality to set up my
News & Information page pulling featured articles only from two categories,
the Solar blog and the Press Releases category, and I've managed to keep other featured
articles out of that particular blog.
I've also cleaned up the home page so that I am just showing one article on the
home page of the Web site.