The goal
It is difficult to find a Joomla website that does not use the blog layout to display the list of articles in a category.
This layout shows information that can make one article more appealing than another: photos, intro text, publication date, and tags are all important elements that anyone writing informative content cannot overlook, especially since adding them to Joomla is very simple.
Our goal is to add another important element to this layout for any blog, news website, or online magazine: the author's biography.
The issue
Joomla does not offer comprehensive, specific management of author biographies.
To achieve an acceptable result, you need to fiddle with custom fields, modify Joomla core files, and/or override views and templates... and things get even more complicated if you want to manage biographies for a multilingual website.
These tasks are not within everyone's reach, and it is not easy to keep them working with the rolling updates of Joomla.
How to do it?
Crusco Author Bio Box
Crusco Author Bio Box is the Joomla extension that allows you to add, customize, and display the biographies of your website's content authors wherever you want... even in multiple languages.
The Personal, Professional, and Agency plans of the extension also include a new Joomla module.
It is exactly this module that we will use to achieve our goal!
Let's use the module
Once you have installed and configured the extension, access the module in Content -> Site modules -> Crusco Author Bio Box.
Many of the module's configuration parameters relate to the box's appearance, but we are particularly interested in three of these parameters:
- Author to show
- Position
- Module assignment
Author to show
Setting or not setting this parameter determines how the module works.
If an author is specified, the box will always display that author.
On the other hand, if no author is selected, the module will operate in "automatic mode" and, based on the content being displayed, will dynamically show:
- Article author
- Category author (blog/list)
Are you reading an article?
The author of that article is displayed.
Are you reading the list of articles in a certain category?
The author of the category is displayed.
Which mode should you use? It depends on how you have structured the content of your website.
If you have multiple categories of articles, each category of articles is curated by a different author, and you have correctly set this as the author of the category itself, then you should use the automatic mode: you will have a single module that displays the appropriate biography each time.
If this does not apply to you, then you must choose the author to display.
For our example, we will only enable "Category author (blog/list)".
Position
With this parameter, you decide where on the website you want the module to appear.
Positions vary from template to template.
For our example, we will display the author's biography after the list of articles in the Blog section of HTML Crusco, choosing the Main Bottom position of the Cassiopeia template in Joomla.
Module assignment
Assignment allows you to choose on which pages of the website you want the module to appear.
You can decide whether to display it on all pages or only on those you choose.
If you have decided to use "automatic mode" you can also select "On all pages" as the assignment, because in this case the author's biography will only appear when viewing a list of articles.
To make the biography appear only in the list of articles by category, make sure you have selected only Author category (blog/list), because if Author article is also selected, the biography will also appear for each individual article.
Conclusions
In this article, we learned how to display the author's biography on Joomla blog layout pages using the Crusco Author Bio Box extension module.
If you want to know how to configure and make the most of the extension's many features, take a look at the How-to page.
Let the level up be with you!
