Eventually you'll want to change a menu item, usually the main menu across the top of your page. Joomla ships with several different menus, but typically the main menu is called, "mainmenu." See how easy this is? As usual, you need to sign in to the administrator side of things. To change a menu item, mouse-over "Menu" and select the menu you want to edit. Nine times out of ten, it will be the one with the asterisk, meaning this is your main navigation menu.

The menu selection window will appear. Your window will look completely different than the examples shown below, but the process for changing the items remain the same. To change a menu item, just click the one you want changed. Or, if you're adding a new one, click the "New" button in the upper right.

Note: In the example below, you will notice that "Graphic Design" has a red circle with white X under the column "Published." Just about everything in Joomla, including menu items, can be "unpublished." Everything is still linked up and working; it just doesn't show up. You would need to publish this in order to see the link and the changed you make. Click the red circle, and it will automatically change to a green check mark. 

Now you should either be editing an existing menu item or adding a new one. Either way, you're probably staring at the Menu Item Edit window. It's a very exciting page. You'll want to sit back, drink some coffee and just enjoy it for an hour or so. When you're ready, please continue our tutorial.

Changing text on your menu

In this instance we're going to change the menu item that says "Graphic Design" to "Outstanding Graphic Design." Because, you know... that's what we do. Changing text is easy; there's just one thing you'll need to remember. You'll need to delete the "Alias" text field. This is machine-friendly text that strips out spaces, special characters and anything else it doesn't like.

1. Title: Type in your new text
2. Alias: delete this text. Joomla will create new machine-friendly text when you click save. (See how friendly machines are?) 
3. Click Save or Apply. As in other areas of Joomla. "Save" saves the document/edit window and closes the window. "Apply" saves the document/edit window, but keeps the edit window open.

Changing what the menu does

Most of the time, you're going to have your menu point to an article, but you might also want the menu item to show a contact page, calendar of events or even another website. In order for your menu to display what you want it to, you have poke additional buttons. If you're the type of person who enjoys click a mouse, web development is for you! There's no end to the enjoyment of opening edit windows and poking buttons.

For this example, we're going to change our newly changed "Outstanding Graphic Design" menu and point it to a category of articles. If you haven't figured out the relationship between Sections, Categories and Articles, stop by here and read all about it.

Basically for articles, you have 8 choices. Most of the time, however, you'll only be using 2 of them. The most common choice is to show a single article. The second most common choice is to show all the articles in a specific category. For this example, we're going to do just that. Pick a category and show all the articles in it. (you're going to need to setup your category and/or articles if you haven't done so yet).

To show all the articles in a category you'll need to click the "Change Type" button. 

The next window that opens is where you can change the information that displays when you click the menu item. Here you can select contacts, products in a shopping cart, news feeds, calendars or different articles. Your selection choices are dependent on what is installed on your website, but all the Joomla sites have the same article choices.

1. Click Articles. This will open the article choices.
2. Click "Category Blog Layout." This will show all the articles in a single category. If you want to show a single article, click "Article Layout" 

As soon as you click an option, this window will close and put you back to the menu item edit window.

If you picked "Category Blog Layout"  you'll be asked to select your category. If you picked "Article Layout"  you'll be asked to select your article. You'll need to click the drop-down menu button to see all your choices.

You've told the menu item what to display. Next you'll want to tell the menu how to display it. That's what the Leading, Intro, Columns and links fields will do. If you mouse over each word, a tool-tip will pop up and you can see what each one does.

You may want to give your page a page a custom page title. This is what shows up in the browser when someone clicks that menu item. To do this, click the "Parameters (System)" tab open. Otherwise, the page title will default to whatever your article title is, or your category that you selected. For SEO, you'll more than likely want to create a custom page title that has a key word phrase that will help people find this page.

Type in a better page title: in this case I used: Graphic Design Services located in Boise, Idaho.

I don't want the page title to show on the page, so "show page title" is set to off.

The Page Class Suffix is so you can custom style this page with CSS. If you don't know what this means, leave it blank.  Finally, click "Apply" in the upper right.

If you haven't clicked "Preview" go ahead and do it now. It will open a new window or tab, depending on your browser settings. You may have to refresh your page in order to see the changes. If you like what you see, close the window and go outside and bask in the glow of yet another successful venture in the bowls of Joomla article and menu management.

To make a sub-menu

Do everything above, but just select the menu-item you want this one to fall under. It will be highlighted in blue when you make a selection. For the example below, I'm going to make "Outstanding Graphic Design" a sub-menu item under "Joomla" Which, in turn, is a sub-menu of "Tutorials."