I just created a new footer menu for this Web site.
It's down here at the bottom of the screen and you see the link here for the Login.
I would like to add to that, I'd like to add a link to the home page as well
down at the footer menu. So you might think, okay, well, no big deal.
We'll just go when we create a new menu item and we'll link it up to a single
article which I'll go to home page article and we'll be done.
The downside to doing it that way is this.
First of all, we're just working with the single article.
It's very, very quick and easy to set up the settings for that.
There was only a few things that we clicked on, but think about some of the
category blogs that we've set up for this Web site so far and all of the settings
associated with that.
If we take that route where we make a new menu item in our footer we're going
to have to remember all of those setting that we had already configured for
the same menu items before for the Main Menu and recreate all of those
settings in the footer. Not necessarily the best way to go.
The other disadvantage to doing this is that Joomla!
will set up a new link in the footer and search engines are actually going to
view this as an additional page on your Web site that has exactly the same
content and that will earn you a penalty in the search engines
for search engine optimization.
You want to have unique pages with unique content in them.
The way around this is using something called a Menu Alias inside of Joomla!.
What this will do is allow you to make links in your footer menu that go back to
the home page or any other page on your Web site that already exist without
creating a new menu item from a search engine's perspective and without you
having to go through and reconfigure all of the settings that you already
configured once before on another menu item.
So to do this we're going to go to the back end of Joomla!
and we're going to go Menus and once again the Footer menu, because that's where
I want my link to go. I'm going to make a new link.
So I'm going to click on my New button and my Menu Item Type this time is going
to be under System Links.
Down here under System Links we have some other choices and the one that
I want is Menu Item Alias.
This creates an alias to another menu item or think of alias in the senses of the pointers.
So we're just going to refer back to one of the existing menu items.
Go ahead and click that and we'll type in a name which will be Home.
You probably don't need to touch anything else here on this page.
There's a Footer Menu.
That's where we want it to go.
We want the parent item to be the root. So that's all set.
But we also need to indicate what page this new home item is going to point
to and that is under the Advanced Options tab under Required Settings, this Menu Item.
So right now this is set to Login and that is not what we want.
We want to link to the Home item under Main Menu.
So I'm going to go ahead and choose that and then I'm going to say Save & Close.
Now when I go to the front end of the Web site and I click Refresh, I now have
two links down here on the bottom Login and Home.
So two things about these links down at the bottom of the page.
First of all, you're probably wondering why they are not going horizontally.
They are stacked on top of each other.
I'll show you how to make those go horizontally in a future video.
The other thing that might be more bothersome to you right now will be the
order of these links.
Perhaps, you want Home to be the first link followed by Login.
And I'll show you how to reorder these links in my next video.