Menu Item

In Joomla! Menu Items are used as part of a Menu, to create pages, that load a pre-defined type of content determined by the Menu Item Type. Those pages will be accessible by a static URL (menu-item alias), which we can specify while creating the menu item.

Menu Item Types

We can find many different menu item types in Joomla.

Articles

The most common are the Articles type (from the Joomla! core content component), that let us create pages of a single article, category articles blog layout, category articles lists etc.

Components

In addition, every component in Joomla! provides its own menu items types, to create pages that will display their content or feature their functionality in a specific layout (e.g. users component -> registration form, contacts component -> contact form, search component -> search form/results page, etc).

Usually, a Menu Item has settings, that can control the layout and presentation of the page that is responsible to display (e.g. show/hide page titles or images, select template options for a page, and more).

System Links

Lastly, there are 4 more types of special Menu Items, called System Links.

External Link
Lets you link to an external site. There may be occasions where you also want to point to a link directly to a page on your site.

Separator
This lets you make a text or image only (non-linkable) menu item.

Alias
Lets you make a link matching an existing menu item. This avoids the problem of having multiple URLs pointing to the same content.

Menu Heading
A heading for use within menus, useful when separating menus with a separator.