Creating a Case Studies Page

I'd like your feedback on whether you think this layout works.

I already had a text document with case studies of organisations where I've helped increase a team's skills. Creating a new Section|Category called Case Studies|Teambuilding and a set of articles within it, pasting each case study into an article was easy. The formatting from my Open Office document was preserved with bold headers and bulleted points lists - relief!

I've added a new item to the Main Menu (Menus|Main Menu|New) and was then faced with a choice. The "new menu item" / "edit menu item" screens give you the option as to what kind of page that menu entry creates when clicked.

Category Blog / Section Blog displays the text of the articles up to the "read more" point, which you can put in as you edit the articles. I haven't, though I might. I can choose between single column and multi-column, I can choose how many have full text and how many are just titles and links. I can choose how many case studies are "leader" articles, i.e. are full-width articles above the lower-down, column-formatted ones.

Category List format displays just the list of titles of articles in the category. It's a lot cleaner, so I'm on that for now, pending experimenting with the "read more" business, which I'll blog here when I try it.

I found you can "copy" menu items from one menu to another, so I copied the Case Studies item from Main Menu to Top Menu; this made sure it was definitely the same thing I was creating on each menu. However, now I see there is an "alias" item which appears to allow you to "re-direct" from one to the other. The difference is that you only have one actual copy of the menu item - preventing them getting out of sync and saving space too presumably. I'll be playing with that next and will let you know how it goes.

'Til next time

Dave

My site is here.
Joomla! is based here.

Multiple Home pages

Executive Summary (fancy speak for "summary")

Different menus had entries for "Home" but the page you got differed depending upon which one you clicked. I have solved the problem for now but still suspect there is a deeper issue to be solved.

The Story

I have a "main menu" and a "top menu". I also have a "breadcrumbs" which I did not realise until Guru Simon pointed it out to me. Yes, I'd heard the phrase (seen it in the "modules" menu in Joomla!, to be precise) and I knew about that string of links crossing the page under the header that showed you where you'd got to, but never connected the two.

So I have three places you can click to get to "Home". The problem was this: When you go directly to http://teamcoachingnetwork.com, you got the header, the articles, the menus, but also the "login" box, the info about who else is on the site (c'mon, everyone!) and the poll about what you think about training courses. On the other hand, when you clicked on Home in the top menu after going somewhere else, you don't get those extra items.

At first I thought there might be some other way to connect the menu items directly to the front page; maybe there is, and I'll try that later. What I did discover is that the appearance or not of modules, such as logins, polls, news stories, etc., can be selectively controlled from within the modules menu. My Menu items for Home can be ticked to appear in both version of the "home" page.

I went to Extensions|Module Manager|Polls(for instance) and at lower left I get "Menu Assignment". Using CTRL-leftclick I can select both the Home in my Mainmenu and Home in my Topmenu and voila - the poll appears in both home pages. I then repeated for the other items (Login and Who's Online).

Next thing to try is making the non-default pages simply links to the base domain http://teamcoachingnetwork.com and the upcoming news is about how my friend Jo managed to handle the tricky upgrade from 1 to 1.5 while preventing evildoers using her server to broadcast malicious spam.

'Til next time,

Dave

My site is here.
Joomla! is based here.