Creating a Hidden Menu in Joomla

Posted in Tutorials

There are often times when a hidden menu is useful in Joomla.   Menus are central in Joomla.  Sometimes you need to have a menu for an article just to control the article’s behavior rather than to display a menu item link to the article.  In this case, a hidden menu would be appropriate.   For example, in order to remove the article id from the URL of an article, one solution is to assign the article to a menu item.   In this tutorial, we create a hidden menu so that the article can be assigned to it.  The menu is “hidden” because we don’t need to display the menu on the site.  We are just using the menu for control purposes.

1.  Go to Menu -> Menu Manager -> Add New Menu.

2. For title put “Hidden Menu”.  For “Menu Type” put “hiddenmenu” as shown …

3.  Save and close.

4.  Back in the Menu Manager, you see your Hidden Menu listed and to the right there is a link that says “Add a module for this menu type”.  Click this link.

5.  Take all the default settings as shown below.  The important one is set “Position” to nothing.  This is what makes the menu hidden.

To clear the position of a module, you click the x icon in the drop list…

6. Save and That’s it, menu is hidden.

See this tutorial on how to add articles to your new hidden menu.

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