User Documentation Joomla's menu system is what connects your visitors to your site's content. This section covers everything from creating your first menu through to arranging complex, multi-level navigation, plus a handful of specialised techniques for particular situations.
Menu Basics
The building blocks of Joomla navigation: menus, the items inside them, and the types of content those items can point to.
- Adding a New Menu – The three basic steps to a working menu: create the menu itself, place a menu module for it, then add the items that link to your content.
- Menu Items – What menu items are and how to add them, the basic navigation units of a Joomla site.
- Menu Item Types – The full range of menu item types available across Joomla's components, from Articles to Contacts, Users, and Smart Search.
Arranging and Displaying Menus
Once you have menu items, these articles cover shaping how they're ordered, nested, positioned on the page, and split across different areas of your layout.
- Menu Item Order – Reordering menu items, and their child items along with them, by drag and drop or from a list.
- Menu Positions – Choosing where a menu module appears on the page and switching its layout, for example from a sidebar list to a dropdown.
- Submenus – Building hierarchical, parent-child menus and assigning separate modules to show the right submenu on the right pages.
- Split Menus – Breaking one menu structure across several areas of a page, so primary links sit in the header while secondary links populate a sidebar.
Specialised Menu Techniques
A handful of more specific menu techniques for particular situations, from restricting a menu to certain users to controlling exactly how submenus behave.
- Archived Articles – Setting up a menu item that lists articles you've archived rather than deleted, with filtering by month and year.
- Custom Administrator Menu – Building a restricted backend menu so a specific user group only sees the admin tasks it needs.
- Auto Redirect Guests to Login – Combining a hidden, access-restricted menu with aliasing to send unauthenticated visitors straight to login before reaching the page they wanted.
- Keep Submenus Open – A template override that keeps submenus visibly open rather than collapsed, without the usual toggle behaviour.