A standard Joomla! 1.5 website page will display one article. However, you can also display a number of articles together on one page using the internal menu link options:
Category Blog Layout or Section Blog Layout

How to link to a single article from the menu bar was covered here.

In order to link to any article whether as a single page display or as a blog article layout, you must have created the article first. Here’s how to create a new article suitable to display on a Blog-style Joomla! 1.5 page.

If you prefer a blog layout, here are the options:

Navigate to the Menu you wish to add your new link to (Menus – Main Menu or whichever menu you require), then choose Internal Link - Article. You will be given a choice of layouts.

• Category Blog Layout
  - this will display articles you’ve added to a chosen category
• Category List Layout
  - this will display all the article categories you have
• Front Page Blog Layout
  - this will display all articles you have chosen to go on the front page. Read more on Front Page Articles
• Section Blog Layout
  - this will display all the articles in a chosen section
• Section Layout
  - this will display all the sections you have available

Once you understand how to create a Category Blog layout, you will see that the principles for other Blog layout options are very similar. Here’s how to create the Category Blog Layout…

For a Category Blog layout click that option from the list.

This will bring up the appropriate Menu Item Type pane. Give the Menu item a Title. This will be what appears on the Navigation, so keep it short. The alias is used for search-engine friendly urls, so should contain keywords and be in lower case.

There is the option to change your choice of menu to add this link to.

Now pick the Parent item for the navigation link. If toy choose TOP it will appear on the top level of menu bar you have chosen. If you would like it to appear on a drop-down from an existing page, then you choose the page by clicking to highlight it.

Access level can be set to Public so everyone see it or to Registered if you wish only members to see this particular page link.

On the right-hand side are the Parameters you need to set up.

Category – Select the category you wish the articles in the blog layout to be drawn from. You might, for example, have a News Category, and all articles put into that Category would appear on this Blog Layout page.

Description refers to the description which you gave the category when you set it up. You can hide or show this on the page. For example your News Category might be described as “All the latest news from Company XYZ”. If you added an image with your category description, this can be hidden or shown here.

The next 4 items refer to the way the Blog layout displays articles from the chosen category.
#Leading – if you want the first article to display in a single column across the page, type 1.
#Intro – refers to the number of introductory paragraphs you’d like to display.
Columns – is self-explanitory – choose 1, 2 or 3 columns to display the content.
#Links – this is the number of links to display.

Next click on the Parameters (Advanced) tab.

Category Order options are:
No, Order by Primary Order only - the order that you add new articles to the category. You have a selection of options for this under the drop-down list for “Primary Order” directly below.
Title -(Alphabetical) - self explanatory!
Title (Reverse Alphabetical) – self explanatory!
Order - this is the order you have arranged the articles in within the category.
Primary Order is only used in conjunction with the option “No, Order by Primary Order only”
Multi Column Order - sets the articles to be ordered either down or across the page.
Pagination - this gives options for whether to show there are further blog-style pages to view for this category.
Pagination Results - can be shown or hidden (Eg 1 of 3)
Show a Feed Link - may be shown or hidden.

The next set of parameters is Parameters (Component). These will all be set to Global and will serve up the listed options (such as whether to display author, pdf link, date for the article) etc that have been chosen for the website generally. You may alter these for this particular Blog layout here if you wish. They are self-explanatory. If you are unsure of any item, just hover over the label for an item to get a tooltip.

The final section is Parameters (System). It is here that you add the page title for this blog layout. It is an important area to complete for search-engine optimistation purposes. (See tip below.)
Tick NO for the “Show Page Title” option, otherwise the words that you put in here will also appear at the top of the blog style page when you visit. The wording will still appear in the blue title bar for your website.

SEO Tip

The blue title bar at the top of every screen when viewing a web page is a very important area for search-engine optimisation. Choose key words for the page to use in this page title. Keep it to no more than 63 characters.