The default Joomla installation includes a Front Page component that allows you to manage articles that appear on your home page. This is a nice feature, but if you want to divide your home-page content into categories, like an online magazine or newspaper, you will need a different plugin.

One of my clients has an online magazine and wanted the show introduction text, or a teaser, from 5 different categories on their site, and they wanted to display each secton in a different location. Furthermore, they wanted individual control of each category so they could show, for example, 1 article from one category, 2 articles from a second category, and 6 articles from another category. Finally, they wanted to articles to display automatically, so that as they published new articles, the latest articles would automatically show up on their home page as a teaser with the thumbnail of the aritcle image.

The MiniFrontPage module fulfilled their requirements perfectly. What’s more, you can use it multiple times on a page, making it a perfect choice for content rich sites that are continually updated.

The following is a list of configuration settings for the module:

• Specify the pages on which the module will display
• Specify the number columns in which to display the teasers
• Specify which sections and categories from which to display articles
• Specify to display article title, author, article date
• Specify intro text length
• Specify thumbnail inclusion and thumbnail site
• Specify the number of articles to display
• And more…

Unfortunately, there are a few drawbacks to this module:

• Unless your Joomla template module already has locations you can use for this module, you will need to edit your Joomal template and adjust the design to accomodate the module.
• The module does not use Joomla’s Intro Text feature if you set the article parameter to NOT include intro text, plus, it will not use the image from the intro text.