Article settings priority (global, menu, article)

Question

I have a hard time remembering where I can change the articles settings, e.g. the "show category" setting. I repeatedly have to discover that it's possible

1. Globally (go to Content->Articles and pick "settings" up to the right side of the page. Then select tab "Articles")
2. Menu entry for a single article (go to Menu->Manage, select your menu and from there select your menu entry and then tab "Article settings")
3. On the article itself (Go to the article and select the tab "Article settings")

But I am also having a hard time figuring out what the priority of these are. It seems to me that #3 always screws the other two in that whatever I select for a single article menu entry I can't override that setting with explicit settings for that article.

Am I right? Could someone describe the logic here please?

Answer 1

Menu Overrides from Articles and Which Setting Wins

There are three places to set their inclusion or exclusion on the page. There’s a setting in the Article Parameters, the same setting in the individual article, and a third setting in the menu item. So which one wins?

1. The lowest priority goes to the Article Parameters. Think of this priority as the global setting for your articles. The individual article setting and the menu setting override anything set in Article Parameters.
2. The second priority is the menu settings. This priority overrides the Article Parameters, but not the individual article settings. These settings are extremely useful when confi guring blogs. This priority overrides any Article Parameter setting, but it still sets a pile of posts to appear in a certain way, without setting each article individually.
3. The highest priority is the individual article setting. Use this only if a specific article needs the override. For example, perhaps one article would not have the article title display, but every other article does display the article title.

Tips and examples

Some developers like to set all three locations to display or not display something. They say, for example, not to display the author name in the Article Parameters, in the individual article, and in the menu item. This is just creating extra work, and later, if you change your mind, you may have a hard time unraveling what you did in the first place. Learn to take advantage of this series of overrides, and you’ll save yourself a bundle of time and prevent headaches.

For example:

1. If you never, ever want to have an article’s author display on your site, set it in the Article Parameters. Set all the article settings and menu settings to just Use Global (which is set by default).
2. If you want to display the author name in one section blog, set the menu settings for the section blog to show the author name. All articles should stay set to Use Global (the default). That way, you have one place to change your mind later. You can change it on a per-article basis, but if you ever change your mind, you would need to edit dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of articles.
3. If you don’t want to display the author name for one post in that same blog — for example, an announcement in the blog, where an author name isn’t relevant — then setting the author name on a per-article basis makes perfect sense. However, if 80 percent of the posts include author names and 20 percent of the posts do not, I would set the blog to show the author name in the menu setting, and then set individual articles to not show the author name. It’s less work that way.

Source:

Book from Jen Kramer which is called "Joomla! Start to Finish: How to Plan, Execute, and Maintain Your Web Site" I modified some small parts for readability reasons.