I’m working on a Joomla 2.5 site right now, and I’ve got a category that I would like to have displayed differently from the rest of the site. Like, there’s a link in the navigation that takes you straight to this category (listing all of the articles in that category). I’ve managed to achieve this, but I can’t seem to modify the layout now.
What I’ve done so far
- I went into one of the existing templates (beez5) and copied the beez5/html/com_content/category folder and pasted it into my template folder (so I have mytemplate/html/com_content/category). I renamed “default.php” to “progress.php”.
- Went into the Joomla backend to Content → Category Manager → Progress (the category name), then went into Basic Options, and found “progress” as one of the selectable options, right under my template name. So clearly it sees the file. I set it to this option and hit “Save”.
- I visit the category on my site, and everything appears to work fine. I’m not sure what it’s supposed to look like, but the category came up with a different layout from the rest of the site, namely the default Joomla layout. So, a different layout; success, it appears.
The problem
It seems that I can’t actually edit this layout. Any edit I make to the PHP files in the folder, even going so far as to remove large portions of code, seems to have no effect whatsoever on the page. I reload and it looks like I didn’t modify anything, leading me to believe that it’s not actually pulling its template information from these files, but I’ve no idea where it would be pulling it from in that case. Really not sure what I’m doing here, haha. I went through the Joomla docs, but the only information I’ve been able to find has been pretty unclear and usually geared towards 1.5 or 1.6. Any chance anybody with more experience with 2.5 can lead me down the right path?
Thanks!! 🙂
Okay, so I didn’t necessarily accomplish the goal as detailed in the original question, but I’ve managed to achieve the effect that I want. I found that in the Template Manager, one can assign templates to specific categories. So I created two templates — one as my main and one as the template for this category — and assigned them accordingly. Works like a charm. 🙂