Features Of Joomla CMS – Creating and Customising Menus, Creating Sections and Categories, Banner Manager and Site Statistics

   The first part deals with a brief Summary of Joomla Content Management System, Control Panel, WYSIWYG Editor, adding Meta Tags for each page and Creating Links to appropriate menus. Here, in the second part, I will describe few more features of Joomla Content Management System.

Creating Unlimited Menus

   Joomla Content Management system provides the facility of creating as many menus as required. Further you can also specify on which page a particular menu should be displayed. You can create a new menu by clicking on Menu manager under Menu or by directly clicking on Menu Manager on the Control Panel.When the Menu Manager is displayed, Click on New. On the displayed page enter the name of the new menu as shown below and click Save.
Joomla - Creating a New Menu

After the menu is created Click on Site Modules under Modules. When the Module Manager is displayed click on the menu name. You can now choose the pages where you want this menu to be displayed as well as make a host of other settings. Joomla - Editing Menu settings

Ordering Menu Items In Joomla

   You can order the menu items in Joomla by dragging and dropping them in the order that you want the item to be displayed in the menu. As soon as we hover on the 3 dots near the status of the menu item we get a plus sign with 4 arrows. we have to drag that.
The new order will be saved immediately and the full task will be accomplished in one step. Joomla - Ordering Menu Items

Category Managers

   Joomla allows us to create unlimited categories. Under each category we can have as many sub categories that we want.

Banner Manager

   You can manage banners from the banner manager. Here you can set the impressions for each banner and find out the impressions made as well as the impressions remaining for each banner. Details of banner and client management are given in Advertisement Banner Management in Joomla.

Site Statistics

   Basic Site statistics is also provided in the form of hits to the website (Total Page Views). In case you wish to display this you can activate the statistics extension.

Changing Site Configuration

   The global settings in Joomla can be done in Global Configurations where a large number of default settings can be specified. You can turn on the search friendly urls, .html suffixes for web pages, enter site name and default description. Another setting is the removal of the site name from the page title. Joomla - Site Configuration

Other Customizations For Joomla

Other Customizations For Joomla - SEARCH page Customisation

   There are several other customizations that can be done in Joomla. Another customization is to add noindex to the search pages generated by the the Joomla search facility which searches only within your site. This is achieved by means of a template overide for the com_finder module as shown below. Joomla - Template Override com_finder module

Title Customisation

   In the default Joomla Content Management system installations all the page titles start with the site name. Suppose we are developing the website of a travel agency say ABC Travels Ltd., Goa and we enter ABC Travels as the site name in Joomla. We will have each page title that reads ABC Travels - <Title of the Page as specified by you>. This wastes precious space in the title and therefore it is desirable to remove it. If you do not want the site name to appear on each and every page title as is the default, it can be removed by changing the setting in the Global Configuration of Joomla. In addition the meta tag name="Generator" can also be removed. By removing this it will be extemely difficult to tell that your site is using a Content Mangement System.
Joomla - SEO Settings
  

Features of Joomla Content Management Systems (CMS):

  • Runs on Apache web server with PHP and MariaDB or MySQL
  • Facility to add or edit content, upload and add images, and to manage the content via a simple browser based interface
  • After the site is configured only basic word processing skills required to manage the web site.
  • Support for unlimited menus, sections and categories.
  • Menu Items can be ordered as per requirement.
  • A Joomla site can be made to look like a Static site (HTML site) with Search engine Friendly URL's. Page names as well as titles can be fully customised.
  • Ability to restrict access to certain sections of site only to a particular group of users
  • Look and Feel of your site is fully customisable via "Themes". More than one theme can be used for the same site.
  • Generates very clean code. Hence pages are generated relatively fast.
  • Customised page titles can be used for each page so as to be appropriate to the content contained in that page.
  • Customised page descriptions as well as keywords can also be used if required by you so as to provide a page summary in the description.


  

About The Author

Joseph de Souza is a leading Freelance SEO consultant and Web developer in Goa, India with more than 17 years of experience in internet marketing.
He has a proven track record and has has helped several companies increase their traffic many times over and thereby increase their revenue and profits.
Besides English, Joseph has also successfully optimized two German language websites and a Danish language website and obtained outstanding results.