iris lines designs

I'm preparing a talk for JoomlaDay NYC on Alternative Layouts and Custom Menu Item Types.  There had been so many posts on the joomla.org forum about these new capabilites of Joomla 1.6 and 1.7,  and so many were complaining that the "feature" simply didn't work, I was getting a bit worried about the presentation.   I had proved them working back in the spring for a presenation at Joomla Day New England, but had things changed in the subsequent versions?

Finally last week I had a chance to put them all through their paces and the good news is that Alternative Layouts and Custom Menu Item Types DO indeed work --  for all kinds of Joomla items:   articles, contacts, weblinks, and category displays like blogs and lists.

The ONE Joomla entity where my template overrides (which worked) could not be turned into Alternative Layouts OR  Custom Menu Item Types  was the com_content layout for Categories.

Two years ago I blogged about a solution to have different "read-more" links for different sections of a website.

With Joomla! 1.6 it would be possible to have two variations of the php file that generates the blog,  one that would include the words "read-more" and one that wouldn't.   Since this affects the display in the blog "page", not the individual articles, this layout alternative would actually need to be an alternative menu item type.

Here's how you would do it: