Creating a Menu Item for your Joomla 3 Component

So far in this Joomla tutorial series we’ve been testing our new component by visiting our Joomla site and adding index.php?option=com_helloworld to the url, as in:

https://example.com/index.php?option=com_helloworld

In this tutorial, we will show you how to create a menu item for your component. This will allow you to add a link to your menu that points to your component with a URL similar to:

https://example.com/hello-world

To create a menu item:

1. Decide which view. Components can have multiple views. Decide on which view you want to create a menu item for.
2. Go to tmpl folder. Navigate to the tmpl folder of the view you chose in step 1.
3. Create default.xml. Create a default.xml file in the tmpl folder with the following text:

   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <metadata>         <layout title="Title">                 <message>message</message>         </layout> </metadata>

   

   When going through the process of creating a menu item, the Title and message in the code above will be shown in the listing of item types (as in the screenshot to the right):

Testing our new menu item

The whole process thus far of creating a new menu item for our component has been actually quite easy. If everything’s not “clicking” yet for you, review the following screenshot (hopefully it’ll tie everything together).