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Sectionnav Module

Sectionnav is a module for Joomla 1.0.x that lets you create a navigation menu for the sections of your site. The menu that will be generated consists of three levels: sections, categories, and content items.

Admins can specify the sections to be listed by entering a comma separated list of at least two section IDs in the module configuration. The order of the entered IDs determines the order of the output list. By default all specified sections will be displayed as an unordered list (ul-tag) in the module.

After clicking on a section link the categories in this section will be listed below the section link and a section blog is displayed in the main body area (mosMainBody). From here you can click on a category link to list the content items contained in this category and a category blog in the main body area.

Then you can click on a content item link to display it in the main area. By default accesss keys are automatically assigned to the links for better accessibility of your site. With this module each content item can be accessed with a maximum of three clicks without the need of adding menu items for your content.

Features

  • Specify the sections to be listed in the order of the output.
  • Enable or disable the automatic assignment of accesss keys.
  • Exclude certain keys for the use as accesss keys.
  • Define the CSS properties for the accesss keys in your site's template CSS file via the CSS class accesskey.
  • Individual styling in your template's CSS file. The look and feel of each level can be defined via the CSS classes: sectionnav_section, sectionnav_category, and sectionnav_content.
  • Define the sort order for categories: Alphabetical, Admin Ordering.
  • Define the sort order for content items: Alphabetical, Admin Ordering, Last Modified First, Most Popular First.
  • Choose between the database fields title or title_alias to be used as menu item names.
  • Select whether to expand sections so that all categories within are visible.
  • Select whether to expand categories so that all content items within are visible.
  • Use mod_sectionnav as a sitemap for your content sections and categories.
  • Valid XHTML output as unordered lists (semantic markup).
  • Use more than one instance of this module on the same page (disabling the accesss key assignment is recommended)

Requirements

There must be a menu item of the type "Blog - Content Section" for each section specified in this module to be able to determine the correct Itemid. Otherwise an Itemid won't be set resulting in a pathway that will not work correctly.

Another drawback is that you cannot assign modules or templates to a section, if you do not have a menu item for it. There is no need for such a menu item to be published, you do not even need to publish the menu where you added it. There is also no need to add menu items for categories.

Constraints

More than one instance of this module can be used on the same page but accesss keys may be assigned ambiguously. This also applies if this module is used together with mod_sectionmenu.

Only letters will be assigned to accesss keys. If a link consists of other characters (e.g. numbers, hyphens etc.), it will not be accessible via the keyboard. The same applies for links where all of it's letters are already in use as accesss keys.

Links

This is a great module! Installed without a hitch and am currently using it on a soon to be published new site.

What I would wish for is to be able to Display the Created Date of each Content Item next to the title.

Thanks!