This tutorial tells you how to make static pages for Joomla! 1.0.12 & 1.0.13 and what they are generally used for.

Many website owners are still using Joomla’s “stable” versions as opposed to using the newest version 1.5 RC2, which is, by the way, a complete overhaul and still a “Release Candidate”, as the RC implies. If you are using 1.0.12 & 1.0.13 you can refer to this tutorial for static pages.

what are static pages used for in a dynamic environment?

You can use them for making thankyou pages for purchased content, for emails or registration pages – that is, if you want your own custom page and not a page that a content management system automatically makes for you. You can also use them for pages that usually don’t change in content, like an “about us”, a “contact” page, for help screens and privacy policies.

The way I handle my static pages is to make a menu that is not present on the site, aka a “fake” menu which holds all static page links on the site. No-one will see this menu displayed on the site if you don’t set it to be published in the module manager. Likewise, if you assign the menu to a position that is not coded into your template, the menu will still be loaded but it won’t be seen. You choose. You do not need to make a different menu necessarily, but you may find it more efficient to have these pages separated from your “real” menus, especially if you have a large site with many links. I have my links to static pages in a menu called (how boring) “other menu”.

tutorial

As I mentioned in the tutorial for MathGuard 2.0, here is the simple and quick solution to making a static thankyou page for your contact page.

1. Navigate to your static content manager and click on “new” in the top right-hand menu.

2. Now, create your static page as you would like it to look. Give it a meaningful title, add images to the content if you like or write a message that you would like the user to see once the email has been sent. That may be a message like, “Thankyou for your email. Please allow up to 24 – 48 hours for a reply” or what ever text you would like to be displayed.

3. Change the Parameters on the right-hand side to suit your site. Personally, I don’t type in any Meta Data because this page shouldn’t be able to be indexed in a search engine and it only should be displayed when a user has sent an email successfully. If you created a menu for static links before-hand, it will show up along with your other menus used on the site under the “Link To Menu” tab. Here you need to click on the menu you would like to place the link into to highlight it, give the link a name and click the button “Link To Menu”.

Then SAVE.

4. Navigate to your menu and you should see link to your static page.

5. Click on the menu item and the menu item’s details will be displayed. You can now change whether the link will be opened in a new window with or without browser navigation or the same (parent) window. I personally just let it open the static page in the same window. Other things you could change are pretty straightforward but basically, you don’t need to alter anything as it is automatically set to be published and the access level is “Public”.

What you should do is to tick the box “yes” to give it a unique Itemid in the right-hand panel. After that, click “save”. Now you’re back in the menu’s list, so you need to go click on your link again to get to the details. On the left-hand side you will see the URL of your link. Copy this URL by highlighting it and using the keyboard keys Ctrl c.

6. Now, go to the menu which contains the link to your contact page. (Don’t copy anything else in the meantime otherwise your saved to clipboard URL will be lost and you’ll have to go back to get the link again). Click the contact link and the contact page’s details will be displayed. Here you can set all the parameters for this link. Scroll right down to the bottom of this page and on the right-hand side there is a box named “Thank You Page URL”. Paste the URL you copied into this box and you’re all set.

This concludes this tutorial. I hope it was helpful to you.

Tags: joomla
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