Default Menu Tips and Tricks
If you have ever struggled to figure out how to change the title of your site, the number of columns on your home page and other site-wide items, you'll be interested to read more about the default menu item and its configuration. It handles a number of items that one would expect to be part of global configuration but are not.
From the menus tab, select the menu an * next to it. The * denotes the menu with your default menu item. For most sites this is your link to 'Home'.
All of the parameter settings that we'll consider in this FAQ are located on the righthand of the screen.
By default, Joomla's home page layout consists of one leading article that spans across the page. Subsequent articles appear in a two column layout, which can be troublesome with three column layout sites, or with more visual content. In this case a one column layout for content makes sense. Columns determines the number of columns. Leading is only useful for multi-column layouts and determines the number of articles that the span the page.
Intro determines the number of articles that are displayed at any given time; Links display More Articles and their respective titles. Any additional home page content then appears on subsequent pages of your site.
Parameters (Component) is a lengthy set of options that determine how articles within this section of the site are displayed and what options are associated with them.
By default, Joomla displays a number of things like Author Name and Modified Date and Time, that may not be very useful information. Although you can and should also configure these variables globally through your site (Article Manager, Parameters), you can also customize them section by seciton.
My recommendation is to customize these types of settings globally as often as possible, but there are a couple that are worth considering.
Section Name and Category Title are both items that you may want to treat differently in different sections of the site.
Likewise, some content may be more or less amenable to Article Rating/Voting and needing to know Modified Date and Time. For example, if I have an FAQ section of th site, both of these types of information might be extremely valuable to me as both an end-user and as the author of that content. I might enable them exclusively in this section of the site even though my global setting for them is to leave them disabled.
Please note that this screen shot is not intended to display nor discuss every option available in this section, but to focus on its most likely use as a way of setting category-level parameters.
Much like the discussion of the previous parameters, Parameters (Order) allow me to control the order of items that appear in this particular category, and how to deal with content in multiple columns.
In some respects Parameters (System) may be the parameter settings that are most important to you, and the most likely to overlook.
By default, Joomla uses Page Title as both the title that appears in the browser chrome, and that appears by default on your home page. The default value of the setting is typically not descriptive of your site, and will work to your disadvantage when it comes to SEO. Remember to both change your Page Title and determine whether or not you want it showing on your home page.
The last item that might be helpful in Parameters (System) is SSL Enabled. If you're using SSL on your site, it may only be relevant to one section of your site. You can control that here. Otherwise, I typically set this to ignore so that the SSL setting is controlled on the site by the previous URL on the site visited. For example, after my visitors login, they establish an SSL connection; every page for the rest of that visit is managed through SSL as a result.