Built-in Components: Banners, Contacts, News Feeds, Polls, Search, and Web Links

Joomla comes with a few components built in. Let’s spotlight the ones that appear in the backend under Components in the top menu.

Banners

You can probably guess what the Banner component does. It enables you to place banners on your website. Some websites use the Banner component as a method of generating revenue by selling banner impressions, while other websites might choose to use it to link to other parts of their site.

The three parts of the banners functionality are banners, clients, and categories. You can see their order in the menu (Components→Banner), but we’ll explain the pieces in reverse order—the order of how they’re set up.

Categories

Categories provide a way to group similar banners together. When displaying banners on the frontend, you have the ability to define which category you want the banners to be pulled from. For more information on loading modules inside an article, see Showing a Module Inside an Article.

Clients

In the Clients tab, you can create and edit clients. If you are selling impressions on your website, then you should set up a client for each company that wishes to advertise with you. When displaying banners on the frontend, you also have the ability to define which client you want the banners to be pulled from.

Banners

Figure 8-1 shows what the Banner Manager looks like when the Joomla sample content is installed. Each item listed is a separate banner item. While ...

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