How to create a hierarchical Joomla! menu structure

Question

I need an advice ...

I'm using joomla 1.7.2.

I want to plan a site, the site should be very hierarchical.

Actually it will contain categories and sub categories and sub categories and ... And finally all relevant articles that will be under the sub-sub ... Category that was selected.

My ambition from Joomla is to create a main categories menu that looks something like that (never mind the graphics at the moment):

menu example here

Clicking a category will lead to the same look a like menu with his sub-categories.

I guess you could create an article for each category that will contain a menu that will display the relevant sub-categories. but it seems incorrect.

Is there a more correct way to build the hierarchical structure of the site menus?

Sorry about the long text.

I would appreciate any response.

Yoni.

Answer 1

Seems like you are going to make your users click a lot of links to get to the content. How deep do you plan to go? You might want to look in to one of the many mega menus to make it a little easier to get to what they are looking for.

In any case, the basic functionality you are looking for is built in to the core Joomla menu. First, you would need to create a single menu with the structure you described. Link the parent menus to the Joomla category. The trick is in the parameters of the menu module. You will need one menu module for each level of categories you have in your hierarchy. Each module will need to be assigned to every menu item on the corresponding level and the start and end level parameters will need to be set to one level below the current level (0 being the root or top level). You will also want to have sub menu display turned off.

when you click through the links the menu will only display the child menus of the current menu item you are on.

Answer 2

If you want to create an hierarchical menu in Joomla you have to "split" the menu in different parts. Please follow these tutorials:

• TODO: Creating a split menu in Jooma
• Video TODO: Joomla's Split Menu System