After years of using Joomla it's easy to lose sight of the simple things. We get asked a lot of the same questions on our forum about how to use Joomla and by far the most popular is the one concerning the Joomla menu item id issue that we covered a while ago.

Last week we were asked how to create a default menu item in Joomla and so I have just posted the tutorial for creating a blog category menu item and setting it to the default menu in Joomla 1.7.

Over the next few weeks we will be populating the Using Joomla section of our knowledgebase in the hope that we cover a good portion of the questions that new users have when they first start using Joomla. So if you have any questions that are screaming out to be answered let us know and we will add them to the list.

Have you ever noticed that sometimes pages appear with the wrong modules? For example, your search results may be appearing with all the homepage modules. The Joomla functionality responsible for this is the itemid.

What is the Joomla itemid?

The itemid, along with some other functionality, tells Joomla what modules the requested article or component should load. This usually works great, but when a component or article has no menu item, and therefore no itemid, Joomla assigns a default value of 1. For almost all sites Itemid=1 is the frontpage, so Joomla loads up all the frontpage modules with your component or article awkwardly squished in, if it shows at all.

It always feels a little bit like cheating to use display: none in any css declaration, but its such an easy and useful tool that sometimes it's the best (read easiest) way to add some flexibility to the way certain content gets displayed on the page.

As you are probably already aware, the Joomla module class suffix system is a seriously powerful system and in my opinion really underpins Joomla templating and opens up a world of flexibility and configuration for the end user.

The following is a really simple hack that allows you to hide certain modules on small screens using the magic of media queries combined with a module class suffix.

Joomla 1.7 has simplified much of the Joomla content workflow, making things easier and faster to do. However, one of the things that has gotten slightly more complicated is finding and emptying the trash.

In Joomla 1.5, I'm sure you know that the article trash can be easily managed and emptied by selecting Content > Article Trash from the main menu. In Joomla 1.7, that menu item is gone but the trash feature is still there.

You already know that the Zen Grid Framework allows for basic css and javascript to be added in the template administration. But what if we want to add functionality for something like FancyBox? This is a little beyond the scope of the basic include functionality, so let's look at a good, efficient way to do this.

Have you ever needed a simple way to provide your clients or users with a screenshot of all the preference panels in a module, menu, or content item? With this little trick you can quickly and easily provide screenshots for support, user documentation, or personal reference.

I strive to make readers stay long and read much.

That said, if I want to:

• expand a point without labouring it or
• refer to a more authoritative source,

I happily link out to the most relevant page – wherever it is.

Don’t worry. Readers who feel valued, respected, educated and entertained will return to your content no matter how many links you offer.

But while they appreciate links, they don’t like being booted out of what they’re reading.

This derails their train of thought.

Sometimes it's the little things that trip you up ... and so it was the other night that Paul Bundred and I tried to figure out how to reorder modules in the Joomla 1.7 module manager. It turned out to be one of those things that took 20 minutes to figure out and a little bit of swearing at the screen but was ultimately solved in two simple steps.

The Challenge

Try as I might we couldn't seem to get the up / down arrows to show on the page or even type into the ordering box to effect any change in the way my modules were ordered on the page.