Module not appearing on article in Joomla

Question

We recently hired a new person and want to update the bio section of our Joomla site to include the new hire. Our site consists of a template with several custom html modules that display things like header menus, and an individual page for each team member.

Here are the steps I followed to add the new bio:

• Copied the Article A (an old bio article) to a new article, Article B
• Copied the Menu A to a new menu item, Menu B

At this point Menu B points to the old article and works great; when I go to menu B, I get Article A. Then I:

• Updated Menu B to point to Article B
• Updated custom modules to link to the new menu item

This fails. The new page with the new article is rendered, but none of the modules appear. I have checked on the menu page under the Module Assignment for this Menu Item and the two articles have the exact same module assignment. They articles also have the exact same template since one is a copy of the other, and the HTML is there, with no content.

I also tried:

• Clearing the cache in Joomla
• Clearing the browser cache
• Rebuilding menus
• Restarting the server

But to no avail.

The strange thing, though, is if I go to the modules, and hit "show on all pages" it appears on the new article! But when I link that module to the menu directly, it is missing.

I have also tried creating a new menu and article from scratch without copying and making sure I had the right template. This still results in missing modules.

Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong?

Answer 1

Sometimes I have found that when checking module assignments to menus in the 'Menu Manager' this can be buggy and modules don't get assigned properly. I tend to always use the 'Module Manager' instead. All of this answer assumes that you already have multiple team member pages and that the custom module is designed to be applied to all of these.

On my own joomla dev site I went through the same process you describe and encountered no problems, but this doesn't mean much since I can't see your exact setup. However, this is what I would try:

• Go into 'Module Manager' and find the specific module that you want to assign to your new menu item.
• Go into this module's details and under 'Menu Assignment' choose 'No pages'. This will reset all the assignments so the module doesn't show up on any pages.
• Then in the same dropdown menu choose 'Only on the pages selected' and go through the checkbox list to reassign to all relevant menu items that require your module.

This should help to troubleshoot the following:

• if the 'Modules linked to the menu' section in the 'Menu Manager' has somehow bugged like it does regularly for me, the method above should reset this
• if you can't find the pages/articles that you need in your updated company bio section in the 'Menu Assignment' section of the module details, you'll know there is something wrong with your menu structure

If this doesn't fix the issue, my next step would be to check that there are no additional classes or requirements on your menu items that are required to make the custom module work correctly. Check the menu items for extra info in the 'Link Type Options' and 'Page Display Options' and make sure these are consistent across the menu items.