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Version: 4.x

featured-articles

Introduction​

In Joomla! Featured Articles appear in a blog layout well-suited to be a Home page. Any article in any category may be selected as a featured item. The articles my be arranged using one more ordering criteria, for example by Featured Articles Order or by Most Recent First.

Choosing Articles to Feature​

  • Select Content → Articles from the Administrator menu to see a list of all of your articles.

The default order of the Articles list is ID Descending, which puts the latest article at the top of the list. You can select any article to be featured with a click on its grey button under the Featured heading. You can also unselect a featured article by clicking on its yellow button. To bring featured articles to the top of the list select the Featured column heading, once to put them at the bottom of the list and again to bring them to the top of the list. The following screenshot shows the Articles screen after installation of sample data:

Featured Articles list

In this case four articles are featured, enough to create an interesting blog layout. You can select multiple articles to feature by selecting row check-boxes and using the Actions → Feature button in the Toolbar. Also, in the Articles: Edit screen you may toggle the Featured field from No to Yes and vice-versa.

A blog layout works best if the amount of text in each item is limited to one or two paragraphs with a link beneath to the full article. You insert a Read More link in the Article: Edit form using the CMS Content / Read More button.

There are many options available to set the display order of your Featured Articles. The ordering method is selected via the Blog Layout tab of a Featured Articles menu item. One option is to show the items in the order that you see in the Articles list, for which you need to set the list order manually:

  • Select Content → Featured Articles from the administrator menu.
  • Select the Order column header (the one without a label to the left of the Featured column). Verticle ellipsis appear to act as grab handles.
  • Drag any handle up or down to change the order. Note: the column heading icon points to the top of the order.

Choosing the Layout​

In a new Joomla 4 installation the Home menu item is of type Featured Articles in the Main Menu. A site with sample data installed will show four different menus for you to explore later! Most of the configuration is already done. To change some of the configuration options proceed as follows:

  • Select Menus → Main Menu from the administrator menu.
  • Select the Home menu item.
  • Select the Blog Layout tab.

There are lots of tabs for settings various aspects of the display. Most will be covered elsewhere. Here is a screenshot of the Blog Layout:

Featured Articles Menu Blog Layout Tab

You should experiment with the settings: change, save and then view the site Home page.

Appearance​

Try these:

  • # Leading Articles: is the number of articles to show first, often styled to use the full width of the page.
  • # Intro Articles: is the number of articles to show below the leading articles, often set in columns and rows. For example, if the number of columns is 2, there will be two Intro Articles next to each other, each taking up 50% of the width of the page.
  • Article Class: add CSS classes here to customise article styles. You can use Bootstrap classes or add your own classes defined in your user.css style sheet, described in the information on templates.
  • # Columns: the number of side-by-side Intro Articles. Try 2 or 3.
  • Multi Column Direction: The tops of each Intro Article align differently depending on whether the Down or Across option is chosen.
  • Links:: is the number of article titles to show that that were not Leading or Intro Articles. If there are eight Featured articles in total, with one Leadin and two Intro Articles then the number of links would be five, or whatever the maximum number set in the Links parameter.

Content​

  • Select Categories: If you have a large site you may wish to have several Featured Article menu items, each showing a selected Category. Make your choice here or leave blank to include All Categories.
  • Category Order: If you have selected several categories to appear in Featured Articles you can select how to order them.
  • Article Order: Lots of choices to set order, such as Most Recent First or Featured Articles Order (the order you set in the Featured Articles list).
  • Date for Ordering: The most obvious choice is Published date.
  • Pagination: Whether or not to show the page selection bar beneath the articles.

Enjoy!