In our last Joomla 3.0 tutorial, we walked you through the steps for setting up a menu in Joomla 3.0. The menu will not show until we add items to the menu, and so we’ll now walk you through the steps for adding links to your menu.
How to add a new menu item to a menu in Joomla 3.0
- Log into your Joomla 3.0 admin dashboard
- In the top menu, click Menus and then click the menu to which you’d like to add a link to. If you’re following along with our Joomla 3.0 Menu Tutorial, we clicked on the Test Articles menu.
- In the top left of the page, click the New button
- There are quite a few settings you can adjust for your new menu item. In order to make this tutorial a little less complicated, we are only going to enter the following settings:
Setting |
Description |
What we entered |
Menu Item Type |
The type of link: Component, URL, Alias or Separator |
Single Article |
Select Article |
Select the desired article from the list. |
Test Article 1 |
Menu Title |
The title of the menu item that will display in the menu. |
Test Article 1 |
Alias |
The Alias will be used in the SEF URL. Leave this blank and Joomla will fill in a default value from the title. This value will depend on the SEO settings (Global Configuration->Site). Using Unicode will produce UTF-8 aliases. You may also enter manually any UTF-8 character. Spaces and some forbidden characters will be changed to hyphens. When using default transliteration it will produce an alias in lower case and with dashes instead of spaces. You may enter the Alias manually. Use lowercase letters and hyphens (-). No spaces or underscores are allowed. Default value will be a date and time if the title is typed in non-latin letters . |
testing-article-1 |
Please note!
There are many different types of menu items you can create. For example, you can link to articles, categories, and content created by 3rd party extensions. In this tutorial, we are simply linking to a single article.

After configuring the settings above, click the Save button in the top left of the page.
Now that we’ve added our first menu item to the menu, the menu will now show on our website, as see in the screenshot to the right.