How to Create Modules in Joomla 2.5 | Tutorial
This is step 5 of the tutorial "how to create your first website with joomla 2.5
This is pretty much the last step in creating a page in joomla. Modules are like positions. By creating a module for menu (for example), you're telling joomla where to put the menu on the page. It could be top, left, bottom and so on.
The available module position depends on the template you're using. For example, some joomla templates could have the positions left-top, left-middle and left-bottom. while others could have just left-top and left-bottom.
If you need a lot of module positions, just find a joomla template that has them and download/install it in your site.
In this tutorial, I'll show you how to create a module in the top position of the default joomla template (beez_20). The instructions are the same regardless of your template but the positions could be different.
Things you need for this tutorial:
/Log in to joomla admin back-end. www.yoursite.com/administrator if you have a web host or localhost/joomlafolder/administrator if you're using a local host (PC)
- Go to extensions >> module manager
- In the module manager page, you'll see some modules that Joomla already created. Just leave them there for now.
- If you installed sample data, there will be millions of modules there. Delete all of them except Breadcrumbs, Login form and Main Menu. Be careful; delete the breadcrumbs with position: none and leave the one with a position: 2
- Click New to create a new module
- In the select a module type box, click menu (because we want to use this module to display our menu)
- Enter a title for the module. I used Top Menu (for easy identification).
- Change the show title button to Hide
- Click select position.
- In the display box, you have to choose a position available to the template we're using. So scroll down and click position 1 (it's available for beez_20 template and it's position is at the top of the page).
- Scroll down and look at the menu assignment section of the page. We can decide to show the top menu only on selected pages but we would want our top menu on all pages so we'll leave it at its default state.
- Click save and close.
Now you can see your pages in the front-end of your site because you have successfully created an article, a menu and a module.
- Refresh your site (not the admin site). The site should look like this now.
Notice that we have three menus on top of the page. Click each of the menu and notice that they open the article that we created earlier in step 5.
Believe it or not, we just created a three page website.
This is basically how to create a website with joomla, but the physical appearance of the site can be different. By physical appearance, I mean the color of the header, position of the text, font size, color of the links and stuff like that.
All you need to do is download a joomla template that you like, install it in your joomla website and BAM, you have a brand new look. Some templates are free and some are not, it depends on what you want.
You'll probably need a contact us page right? Follow the simple step by step tutorial.
It won't hurt to add some finishing touches to the site. It's optional. If you want to, follow me to step 6.