The blog style is one of the basic ways in which we can display our articles. This style will show our articles in a structured fashion—it is very organized and quite interesting. I've created a blog menu with the articles inside our Site News category.
Note
Remember, in order to create this you need to navigate to Menus | Main Menu | New | Articles | Category Blog Layout and then configure the parameters as per your requirements.
Our site, more or less, will look similar to the following screenshot:
As you can see, most of the modules have disappeared, and our visitors can fully concentrate on the content that they are searching for. We can achieve this from each module's admin screen in Extensions | Module Manager.
Every module has a Menu Assignment zone to select where the module will appear. The options provided are:
- All—for the module to appear on every page of our site
- None—for the module not to appear
- Select Menu Item(s) from the List—for selecting where our module will appear
I've selected most of the modules to be displayed only on the Home menu, but feel free to select the option that suits your needs.
What can we do now with our articles? We can place them in some module positions in order to have them highlighted. Navigate to Extensions | Module Manager | New and from the menu select Newsflash. Though there are some other options, such as Latest News, we will use Newsflash. In the following screenshot, you can see the options that we will select:
First, we will give the module a Title and call it Latest News. Next, for this module, we will select module_2 of our sample template as the module Position. Then, for the Category, select News/Site News, and also set the Layout as Vertical.
We could have chosen the Horizontal layout. In this case, our news would have appeared in columns instead of being placed one on top of the other.
For now, we are not going to show images and will only display the text of our articles. The last important parameter to change is # of Articles. In our example, we have set it to 4. That's all we need; the other parameters can be configured any way we want. As a result, we will see something similar to the following screenshot on the front page:
To the right-hand side we can see our Newsflash module with four articles taken from the Site News category. Though this is an easy way of showing our articles in a module position, we can make it better. And this is what we are going to do in the next section.