Implementing a fix for menu item ids in Joomla

26Sep 2011

Implementing a fix for menu item ids in Joomla

Published in Tutorials

26Sep 2011

Comments

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.

This happens for components that don't have menu items, and articles from sections that don't have menu items. The solution is actually quite simple, requiring a menu item for components or sections. Here are the details:

Creating a new itemid.

In the menu manager (Menus > Menu Manager) create a new menu. Name it whatever you want. The name will never be displayed anywhere on your site—this menu is just for creating missing itemid's. I'm calling my menu "Itemid fix".
Choose your new menu from the Menus dropdown and create a new item. If you're applying the itemid fix for articles select a type of "Category Layout" (Select link type > Articles > Category Blog). If your needing to fix the issue for a component select that component for the menu item type.
Select the category from the parameters dropdown. I would recommend naming the new menu item to match the section. This will help avoid confusion. For a component just name the new menu item after the component. Create a new item for each section or component that has the itemid issue.
In the module manager, you can apply any modules that you want shown for the section or component. For example, you may want your News menu set to show on all the News section articles.

That's it! You never need to publish the "Itemid fix" menu. It just hides quietly in the background assigning the correct modules for your pages.

BambooBlog