Displaying Articles in a Blog Layout

read_more

Sometimes you will want to have a menu item that leads to a page with multiple articles, arranged in a ‘blog’ layout with introductory text and a link to read the entire article.

You start by creating your articles as usual. Make sure all the articles you want to show together are in the same category.  In each article, insert a ‘read more’ separator after the first few sentences or paragraph. The ‘read more’ button is in the editing toolbar.

read_more


Then follow instructions for creating a new menu item:

To add an item to a menu:

IMPORTANT: The category that you want to link to must already be created. You cannot create a menu item for an item that doesn’t exist yet.

Once the item has been created, to add a menu item, go to ‘Menus’ and choose from the drop down the menu you want to add to.

Example: Menus, Main Menu. You will now see the ‘Menu Item Manager.’

Select ‘new’ on the right hand side menu. You will now see ‘Menu Item Type’ and ‘select’ at the top of the options.

 select menu type button


Click on the ‘Select’ button, and then choose ‘Category Blog’ under the ‘Articles’ section.

select menu type


You will now see the New Menu Item Category Blog Layout page.
new menu item category blog

 

You will need to add a menu title (how the item will be listed in the menu on the front end) and you will need to choose a category on the right hand side. Everything else is optional. 

On the right hand side, you will see a drop down menu where you can select the category to be displayed.

The Blog Layout Options section lets you control the layout of the page. 

Leading = Number of articles to display at full width at the beginning of the page. Can also be set to 0.
Intro = Number of articles to show just the introduction to, with a link to read the full text
Columns = Number of columns on the page, usually 1 or 2
Links = Number of items that are displayed only as links

When you create a new menu item, it will be added as the last item in the menu. To change the order of the menu items, go to the Menu Item Manager. You will have two options for changing the order – the small blue up and down arrows allow you to move a menu item up or down one line at a time. After you click on an up or down arrow, the page will automatically refresh, and you will see the new position. This is fine for moving a menu item up or down one or two positions, but is less useful for moving a menu item from position 20 to position 2. Instead, you can enter a number in the ‘order column’ and then click the small disk icon next to the order column, to save your choice. To move a menu item ‘Activities’ from 20 to 2, for example, you would enter ‘2’ in the order column for ‘Activities’ and click on the disk icon to make the change. The page will now refresh, and you can view the new order, and make further changes as needed. The numbers do not need to be 1,2,3,4 – just know that the lower numbers are higher on the menu, and the higher numbers are lower on the menu.