A set of Joomla plugins (two) which automatically create Joomla menu items (and menu aliases if configured) when articles are created. These menu items are created inside menus which have a menu name that matches the new content's assigned category.

Subsequent updates to content (publish status, trash status, category assignment changes) are automatically reflected as you'd expect in the site menus. When an article is deleted, so is its corresponding menu item.

Plugin parameters allow for finer-grained control over the menu item/content synchronization, and allows for automatic menu alias creation.

Installation

Installation is simple. Be sure to install both the content and system plugins below. (The order of installation doesn't matter.)

Once installed, be sure to enable both plugins in the administrative section.

Usage & Configuration

By default, the settings for automatic menu magic are fairly well-tuned. However, the following plug-in parameters are available under the 'automenu_content' plugin:

Create where title matches - This parameter is a regex which specifies how to find a menu to put our new content in. We pass parameter string along with the item category, to sprintf(). We take the sprintf output and perform the following query to determine which menu to create the item under.: 'SELECT * FROM #__menu_types WHERE title REGEXP (create-where-title-matches-regex-here)' . If you don't understand this description - leave it at the default and you should do fine.

Item Param defaults - These are the parameters to set for the newly created menuitem. Almost certainly you'll want to leave these at the default.

Associate modules with items? - If set to 'Yes', we'll take the first item in the menu_type, and use it as a 'template' for module associations on newly created menu items. So - if the first item in the menu has a 'mod_poll' and 'mod_latestnews' displayed on it, so will any newly created items in this menu. Note - a cheap trick, is that you can create a 'template' menu item that's not published in the root of all your menutypes, and you can use these unpublished menuitems to simply exist as module association templates for your content.

Also create menualias in - This was a hack we needed for one of our projects. We included the hack in this release because it might be useful to others. Here's the gist: For some sites, you may want to have a single "Top Level" menu, which contains aliases corresponding to each of the sites other menutypes. If you're interested in having Automatic Menu Magic keep a 'Top Level' menu populated automatically for you when submenus change - adjust this drop-down to point to that 'top level' menu. Most people probably don't need this.

Create menualias when name matches against - Works the same as the 'Create where title matches' parameter above, except it applies to the menualiases. No need to adjust this if you're not using the "Also create menualias in" feature

Associate modules with Aliases? - Works the same as the 'Associate modules with items?' parameter above, except it applies to the menualiases. No need to adjust this if you're not using the "Also create menualias in" feature

Download

Automatic Menu Magic v 1.00:
Automatic Menu Magic Content v1.00
Automatic Menu Magic System v1.00

Related Plugins

Autocat - An excellent elegant alternative, if you can manage to simply use sections and categories to navigate your site.