Joomla! provides plenty of flexibility when displaying your Web content. Whether you are using Joomla! for a blog site, news or a Web site for a company, you'll find one or more content styles to showcase your information. You can also change the style of content dynamically depending on your preferences. Joomla! calls how a page is laid out a layout. Use the guide below to understand which layouts are available and how you might use them.

Content

Joomla! makes it extremely easy to add and display content. All content is placed where your mainbody tag in your template is located. There are three main types of layouts available in Joomla! and all of them can be customised via parameters. The display and parameters are set in the Menu Item used to display the content your working on. You create these layouts by creating a Menu Item and choosing how you want the content to display.

Blog Layout

Blog layout will show a listing of all Articles of the selected blog type (Section or Category) in the mainbody position of your template. It will give you the standard title, and Intro of each Article in that particular Category and/or Section. You can customise this layout via the use of the Preferences and Parameters, (See Article Parameters) this is done from the Menu not the Section Manager!

Blog Archive Layout

A Blog Archive layout will give you a similar output of Articles as the normal Blog Display but will add, at the top, two drop down lists for month and year plus a search button to allow Users to search for all Archived Articles from a specific month and year.

List Layout

Table layout will simply give you a tabular list of all the titles in that particular Section or Category. No Intro text will be displayed just the titles. You can set how many titles will be displayed in this table by Parameters. The table layout will also provide a filter Section so that Users can reorder, filter, and set how many titles are listed on a single page (up to 50)

Wrapper

Wrappers allow you to place stand alone applications and Third Party Web sites inside your Joomla! site. The content within a Wrapper appears within the primary content area defined by the "mainbody" tag and allows you to display their content as a part of your own site. A Wrapper will place an IFRAME into the content Section of your Web site and wrap your standard template navigation around it so it appears in the same way an Article would.

Content Parameters

The parameters for each layout type can be found on the right hand side of the editor boxes in the Menu Item configuration screen. The parameters available depend largely on what kind of layout you are configuring.

Got a question? With more than 140,000 members, the online forums at forum.joomla.org are a great resource for both new and experienced users. Go ahead, ask your toughest questions, the community is waiting to see what you're going to do with your Joomla! site.

Do you want to show off your new Joomla! Web site? Go ahead, we have a section dedicated to that on our forum.

Do you want to join in?

If you think working with Joomla! is fun, wait until you start working on it. We're passionate about helping Joomla! Users make the jump to becoming contributing members of the community, so there are many ways you can help Joomla!'s development:

• Submit news about Joomla!. We syndicate all Joomla! related news on our news portal. If you have some Joomla! news that you would like to share with the community, please submit your short story, article, announcement or review here.
• Report bugs and request features in our trackers. Please read Reporting Bugs, for details on how we like our bug reports served up
• Submit patches for new and/or fixed behaviour. Please read Submitting Patches, for details on how to submit a patch.
• Join the developer forums and share your ideas for how to improve Joomla!. We're always open to suggestions, although we're likely to be sceptical of large-scale suggestions without some code to back it up.
• Join any of the Joomla! Working Groups and bring your personal expertise to the Joomla! community. More info about the different working groups can be found on the Working Group Roll Call.

That's all you need to know if you'd like to join the Joomla! development community.