The drag n drop builder lets you easily manage and control every aspect of your website. You have the ability to move sections around by simply holding the sections and moving them into the desired position. The section are listed vertically and you can add a section title if you like for easier visual management within the layout manager. Under each section are rows.
Rows in itself are listed vertically inside the sections and act more like a section itself but are listed as part of one HTML element on the front-end.
Each row can further be divided into columns with width, the total of which must be 12 (this is a bootstrap thing).
Each column will can further have multiple elements in it. An element can be a component, message, banner or a module (more on the elements down below).
Using the layout manager gives you another huge possibility that is the ability to have unlimited module positions. Gone are the days where your module positions are hardcoded in the PHP code of your template and you have to modify the xml and php in order to have newer module position.
Starting Joomla 2.5 you are able to create new module positions just by typing the position name and hitting return/enter in the module manager.
With Astroid, you don’t have to know CSS to change colors for your content. You have the ability to change colors at the section and column level. In astroid, we follow the KISS Policy (i.e. Keep it simple stupid), so by default don’t have to select colors at every level it’s only when you want to change the colors, you get the option to choose them.
For the sake of simplicity the color choices are limited to text color, link color & link hover color. You can select colors at section level and each individual column level as well.
As you create your website layout using the Layout Builder, the last piece of the puzzle is adding the element. That’s where content lives and without elements your sections, rows and columns are of no use.
The component element renders the core component on your page. I.e. If you are using a single article layout, the compvonent element would render the actual content of the article including the title
Messages display the core Joomla notifications. It’s the kind of messages a user sees after registering or doing a password reset or similar actions that need to display a message to the user
Banner is an Astroid based element that lets you create a banner (with background image and color), along with a heading and subheading for the page. The banners can be managed at a menu item level and each menu item can have a separate banner
Module element let’s you select module positions and publish them within the layout manager. You can then publish modules to these positions using Joomla module manager
1. Ability to select and publish desired sections, columns or elements in on specific device sizes only
2. Ability to select and publish desired sections, columns or elements in on specific device sizes onlyLet’s say you have a section which you designed but would like only to have it display on desktop and then you created another section, which you only want to be visible for mobile users.
Extra Large Device = Big Screens, any screen that’s wider than xxx pixels or xx inches
Large Devices = These are your average desktops, anything wider than xx pixels
Medium devices = these would be 13 to 15 inch macbooks or the ipad in landscape mode
Small Devices = Phone in Landscape mode
Extra small devices = Phones in Portrait Mode
The background options are available at section, row and element level. Background options level you select a background color, image, video & gradient.
