On occasion as you add things to your Web site, you may want to delete or get
rid of or temporarily unpublish one of your menu items and so I want to show
you how you can do that.
So I'm going to go to Menus>Main Menu and I am going to add a link to my
Web site, and I am going to do that of course by clicking my New button.
I can just go ahead and pick a Single Article, let's say as my Menu Item Type.
And what article shall I pick?
Well, let's pick that News and Information article that we are not really using anymore.
And I am going to give this item a title of Delete Me!, because really
that's all I am going to do with this particular page and I am going to say Save & Close.
If I refresh the front end of my Web site, you'll see the Delete Me!
link shows up in the Menu, if I click on it, I wind up with actually the
News and Information page, but of course it says Delete Me!
over here in the Menu Item, that's because remember our Menu Item and our
Article Title can be completely different, they have absolutely nothing to do
with each other, and here's a great example of that.
There are several states to my Menu Items that I can change right here from my
Menu Manager interface.
So, I've currently got this item published and I know that because the status is
the green checkmark indicating that this is a published link inside of my menu.
I can unpublish my link simply by clicking on the green checkmark and that will
change it to a red X and as you see, there's the red X.
That will indicate that I still have this link, it still exists within my menu,
but it is not displaying on the front end of the Web site.
And in fact, if I come back here, and I just hit the Refresh button, I am on the Delete Me! page,
it will now give me a 404 error, and in fact it looks like it's very
helpfully given me a dump over here on the side, this is something output here
from WAMP, that you're seeing here on the page.
You may or may not see this if you're working with MAMP.
But basically it's a 404 page, it couldn't find the page that I just had.
If I hit my Back button and I go back to my home page, you'll see that the Delete Me!
link is gone for my Main Menu and any one trying to access that URL, winds up
getting a 404 error page.
So, republishing that link by putting a checkmark on it, here we go, will
republish the link here on the front end of the Web site and when I refresh
the page, and I click on Delete Me!, my page is back again.
Now I can also trash this particular Menu Item altogether, and by putting a
checkmark next to this and clicking on the Trash button up here on the top,
that will send this particular item directly to the Trash.
So, I don't have it here, showing up in my Menu list at all anymore.
If I go back to my homepage and I Refresh, I don't have the Delete Me!
link listed over here on the side anymore either.
But it is in the Trash, it's not completely deleted from your Joomla!
Content Management System. How do you know that?
Well, if you go over here to the left-hand side of the screen and switch your
status to Trashed, you'll see that I have the Delete Me!
link located here inside of the Trash.
I can pull it out of the Trash, simply by clicking on the button here which
indicates that this is currently unpublished, and of course it's in the Trash as well.
If I click on this button, that will pull it out of the Trash.
Right now I see nothing on my Menu Manager screen, because I filtered the
results to show me only Trashed items.
I need to switch this back to Published items in order to see my full menu again,
and as you see here, Delete Me!
is back right here inside of my Menu Structure.
To get rid of Delete Me! entirely,
you need to put a checkmark by it and send it to the Trash, switch to
your Trashed and then put a checkmark by this and click Empty Trash, that will
truly get rid of the link.
You may occasionally find that as you create new links inside of Joomla!,
let's say that you create an About link and you call that menu link About, then you
decide you don't what it and you send it to the Trash, you don't completely
empty the Trash, the menu link is sitting there in the Trash, and you create a
new menu link called About also.
What you may see as an error is something about an alias with this menu item
already exists, you can't create another one and you are like, well,
I am looking at my menu and I don't see anything called About, it might be that
there's something called About that's located in your Trash.
So, if you happen to see that error, what you might want to do is go empty your
trash and get rid of whatever is there.
That will allow you to create a menu item that's called more or less the same
thing as the menu item that you just deleted from the Trash.
So, that's a fairly common error you'll see in Joomla!, check your Trash,
if you wind up with some sort of alias error.