Components are larger extensions that produce the major content for your site. Each component has one or more "views" that control how content is displayed.In the Joomla! administrator there are additional extensions suce as Menus, Redirection, and the extension managers.
Content Layouts
Joomla! provides plenty of flexibility when displaying your Web content. Whether you are using Joomla! for a blog site, news or a Web site for a company, you'll find one or more content styles to showcase your information. You can also change the style of content dynamically depending on your preferences. Joomla! calls how a page is laid out a layout. Use the guide below to understand which layouts are available and how you might use them.
Content
Joomla! makes it extremely easy to add and display content. All content is placed where your mainbody tag in your template is located. There are three main types of layouts available in Joomla! and all of them can be customised via parameters. The display and parameters are set in the Menu Item used to display the content your working on. You create these layouts by creating a Menu Item and choosing how you want the content to display.
Blog Layout
Blog layout will show a listing of all Articles of the selected blog type (Section or Category) in the mainbody position of your template. It will give you the standard title, and Intro of each Article in that particular Category and/or Section. You can customise this layout via the use of the Preferences and Parameters, (See Article Parameters) this is done from the Menu not the Section Manager!
Blog Archive Layout
A Blog Archive layout will give you a similar output of Articles as the normal Blog Display but will add, at the top, two drop down lists for month and year plus a search button to allow Users to search for all Archived Articles from a specific month and year.
List Layout
Table layout will simply give you a tabular list of all the titles in that particular Section or Category. No Intro text will be displayed just the titles. You can set how many titles will be displayed in this table by Parameters. The table layout will also provide a filter Section so that Users can reorder, filter, and set how many titles are listed on a single page (up to 50)
Wrapper
Wrappers allow you to place stand alone applications and Third Party Web sites inside your Joomla! site. The content within a Wrapper appears within the primary content area defined by the "mainbody" tag and allows you to display their content as a part of your own site. A Wrapper will place an IFRAME into the content Section of your Web site and wrap your standard template navigation around it so it appears in the same way an Article would.
Content Parameters
The parameters for each layout type can be found on the right hand side of the editor boxes in the Menu Item configuration screen. The parameters available depend largely on what kind of layout you are configuring.
News Feeds
News Feeds (com_newsfeeds) provides a way to organize and present news feeds. News feeds are a way that you present information from another site on your site. For example, the joomla.org website has numerous feeds that you an incorporate on your site. You an use menus to present a single feed, a list of feeds in a category, or or a list of all feed categories. Help
Users
The users extension lets your site visitors register, login and logout, change their passwords and other information, and recover lost passwords. In the administrator it allows you to create, block and manage users and create user groups and access levels. Help
Please note that some of the user views will not display if you are not logged in to the site.
Administrator Components
All components also are used in the administrator area of your website. In addition to the ones listed here, there are components in the administrator that do not have direct front end displays, but do help shape your site. The most important ones for most users are
- Media Manager
- Extensions Manager
- Menu Manager
- Global Configuration
- Banners
- Redirect
Media Manager
The media manager component lets you upload and insert images into content throughout your site. Optionally, you can enable the flash uploader which will allow you to to upload multiple images. Help
Extensions Manager
The extensions manager lets you install, update, uninstall and manage all of your extensions. The extensions manager has been extensively redesigned for Joomla! 1.6, although the core install and uninstall functionality remains the same as in Joomla 1.5. Help
Menu Manager
The menu manager lets you create the menus you see displayed on your site. It also allows you to assign modules and template styles to specific menu links. Help
Global Configuration
The global configuration is where the site administrator configures things such as whether search engine friendly urls are enabled, the site meta data (descriptive text used by search engines an indexers) and other functions. For many beginning users simply leaving the settings on default is a good way to begin, although when your site is ready for the public you will want to change the meta data to match its content. Help
Banners
The banners component provides a simple way to display a rotating image in a module and, if you wish to have advertising, a way to track the number of times an image is viewed and clicked. Help
Redirect
The redirect component is used to manage broken links that produce Page Not Found (404) errors. If enabled it will allow you to redirect broken links to specific pages. It can also be used to manage migration related URL changes. Help