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:
- Decide which view. Components can have multiple views. Decide on which view you want to create a menu item for.
- Go to tmpl folder. Navigate to the tmpl folder of the view you chose in step 1.
- 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).
