Changing Options and Positions for Modules
Posted on 23. Sep, 2008 by admin in Joomla Tutorials.
In Joomla, there are several ways for you to administer modules on the site. Modules display small amounts of content on every page of the site. An example of a module on a site is a menu. It is available from every page of the site and contains the same content so that a visitor can navigate around the site. You can set access on levels so that modules can only be made available to users who are registered users of your site (for example). You can change the position of a module, and you can set the order of the module within the position you have chosen. You can hide or display the title of a module.
In this tutorial we will explore these options.
Click on the Extensions Menu on your administration panel screen and select Module Manager from the list of Options. Select any module from the list that you would like to explore the settings for. I have select My Special Offers module, which displays a Special Offer to my site visitors. Once you select the module click on the Edit button in the top of the menu bar, alternatively you can just click on the name of the module that you would like to edit. This will take you to the Module:[Edit] screen.
Title Option - In the image below you can see my Special Offer Module on the Top Left of the screen. The Title is set to Special Offer, but the text also says Special Offer, repeating the wording which I don’t want. There could be a number of reasons that you do not want to display your title.
Select No next to Show Title in the Details Section on the Module:[Edit] screen. Click the Apply button in the top right of the screen.
To see your changes click Preview in the top right of the menu (the one that is just below the green bar at the top of the administration panel), this will open up your Joomla site to the front page. In the image below the title is no longer there, this has been highlighted in blue for illustration purposes.
In the example above, you can see that my Special Offer appears at the top and my Main Menu appears next. I would like to adjust this so that the Main Menu appears at the top left and the Special Offer is second. In order to do this select the order drop down box from the details section and move to where you want the module to go, in this instance, I want it to be below the Main Menu, so I selected the Main Menu order, which will set my Special Offer Order to that and move the Main Menu up. Click the Apply button in the top right of the screen.
To see your changes click Preview in the top right of the menu (the one that is just below the green bar at the top of the administration panel), this will open up your Joomla site to the front page. In the image below the Special Offer has been moved below the Main Menu, this has been highlighted in blue for illustration purposes.
The last setting that we would like to look at here, is the position of the module. Two of the positions available (left and right) are self explanatory, one will mean your module appears on the left of the screen (as in the image above) and the other will mean that your module appears on the right of the screen. I will now show you how to have a look at the template manager, so that you can see what the other position names mean in terms of your screen real estate.
Click on the Extensions Menu on your administration panel screen and select Template Manager from the list of Options. This will take you to the Template Manager screen.
The template manager screen shows you what template is used to determine the display options of your Joomla site. The default template for Joomla 1.5 is rhuk_milkyway. Click Edit on the top right hand section of your screen or click the name of the template, this will take you to the Template:[Edit] screen. For the moment we do not want to change anything on this screen we just want to view the position placements of the template. Click on the Preview button on the right of the screen.
This will show you a preview of the site template on the screen. In this view, you can see boxes with red writing in them, these boxes show you the positions of various used and unused screen space. You can choose to place your module into any of these options using the same steps that we used above, but changing the position in the position dropdown box in the details section.
