Cybersalt 0-9 and A-Z Menu

Cybersalt 0-9 and A-Z Menu adds a row of letter and number buttons to your Joomla category pages. A visitor clicks B and the page shows only the articles whose titles start with B. It turns a long category, like a directory of artists or a big recipe collection, into something people can browse in a couple of clicks instead of paging through it.

The filtering happens inside Joomla's own article query, so everything else about the page stays the way you set it up: the layout, the article order, the number of articles per page, pagination and who is allowed to see what.

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What's in the package

The extension comes in two parts, installed together from one package.

In System → Manage → Extensions the package itself is listed as Cybersalt 0-9 and A-Z Menu. The module and plugin can't be uninstalled on their own, because the package would be left half-installed. To remove the extension, uninstall the package and both parts go with it.

Installing

1. Get the package zip (pkg_cs-09azmenu_v*.zip) from cybersalt.com.
2. In your Joomla admin go to System → Install → Extensions and upload the zip. Install the package zip itself, not the module or plugin zips inside it.
3. A Cybersalt card appears with what to do next. On a fresh install the plugin System - Cybersalt 0-9 and A-Z Menu Filter is switched on for you, and the card says so. Its Add the menu module button opens a new module of the right type, and Plugin settings opens the Plugins list filtered to this plugin.
4. For updates, enter your cybersalt.com account email on the plugin's Pro Activation tab.

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The package registers Cybersalt's update server, so new versions show up under System → Update → Extensions like any other extension once the site is activated (see Pro Activation). Updating keeps your module and plugin settings.

Quick start

1. Go to Content → Site Modules and click New.
2. Choose Cybersalt 0-9 and A-Z Menu from the list of module types. The install card's Add the menu module button does these first two steps for you.
3. Give the module a title. Most sites set Title to Hide, since the buttons explain themselves.
4. Pick a Position. A position just above the main content works best, so the buttons sit right over the article list. Position names depend on your template; in Cassiopeia it's main-top.
5. On the Menu Assignment tab, leave it on On all pages. The module only ever shows itself on category pages (see below), so this is safe, and you won't have to update the assignment every time you add a category.
6. Click Save & Close, then open one of your category pages on the site.

That's everything the default orange buttons need. The rest of this page goes through the settings, in the same order as the tabs on the module's edit screen.

Where the menu appears

The menu appears only on article category pages, which are the pages Joomla builds for a Category Blog or Category List menu item. It stays hidden everywhere else, including single articles, the Featured page and search results, whatever the module's menu assignment says. If your home page is a Category Blog, the menu shows there too.

You can narrow it down further with Limit to Categories and Show in Child Categories on the Module tab.

Module settings

Module tab

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Show in Child Categories

This decides whether the menu also appears in the categories that sit underneath the ones you picked in Limit to Categories.

• No: the menu appears only on the categories you picked. Their child categories don't get it.
• Yes: the menu appears only on the child categories of the ones you picked, at any depth (children, grandchildren and so on). The categories you picked don't get it themselves. Use this when a parent category is just a landing page for its subcategories.
• Both: the menu appears on the categories you picked and on every category underneath them.

Button Styles tab

This tab controls how the buttons look. Every colour setting opens a colour picker (see Colour Picker tab below). Size settings take ordinary CSS values such as 14px, 1rem or 8px 12px.

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Colour Picker tab

Clicking any colour field on the Button Styles tab opens a colour picker with a row of quick-pick swatches, an opacity slider, and a box where you can type or paste a hex code. It follows your admin's light or dark mode.

The swatches are taken from your site's default template, so the colours you already use are one click away. The picker looks at the colour settings in the template style first, then the template's custom.css or user.css, then its main stylesheet, and offers the most-used colours first. About two-thirds of the swatches are colours and the rest are whites, greys and black. If the template has no colours to offer, you get a standard palette instead.

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The Colour Picker tab adjusts those swatches. These settings only change the colour picker here in the admin. They don't change anything on the website, and changes show the next time you open a colour picker, without saving.

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Custom CSS tab

Use this for any styling the Button Styles tab doesn't cover, such as a shadow or a different font. Enter plain CSS, without <style> tags. It is added to every page the menu appears on.

The module's own styles are tied to its ID, so start your rules with the same ID to make sure yours win. You'll find the module's ID in the ID column of Content → Site Modules. For a module with ID 123:

#mod-cs09azmenu-123 .mod-cs09azmenu__link {
  box-shadow: 0 1px 3px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.25);
  font-family: Georgia, serif;
}

The one character this field won't pass through is <, which is converted for safety. Normal CSS never needs it.

Advanced tab

Layout and Module Class work the same as on any Joomla module.

You won't find any caching options here. That's deliberate: the menu is never cached, because what it shows depends on the category and the letter in the page address, and Joomla's module cache can't tell those apart. Building the menu takes at most one small database lookup, so nothing is lost. Modules first saved under version 1.1.0 or earlier are switched to no caching automatically.

The plugin settings

The plugin, System - Cybersalt 0-9 and A-Z Menu Filter, has two tabs: the Plugin tab with the URL Parameter, and the Pro Activation tab. Open it from System → Manage → Plugins, or with the install card's Plugin settings button.

URL Parameter

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Most sites leave it alone. You might change it if another extension on your site already uses letter, or if you'd like the address in your own language, such as ?lettre=B or ?buchstabe=B.

The name can use letters, digits, hyphens and underscores, must start with a letter, and can be up to 32 characters long. Names Joomla uses for its own addresses, such as id, option, view, catid, Itemid, layout, limit, limitstart, start, format, tmpl, lang and task, aren't allowed. If the name breaks any of these rules, the plugin quietly uses letter instead.

Pro Activation

This tab links the site to the cybersalt.com account you bought the extension with, so new versions arrive through Joomla's own System → Update → Extensions screen. The menu works the same with or without activation. Only the update stream depends on it.

1. Open the plugin and click the Pro Activation tab.
2. Enter the email address of your cybersalt.com account in cybersalt.com Account Email.
3. Click Save. The site checks your membership with cybersalt.com straight away and shows the result at the top of the tab.

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Good to know:

• Saving the tab again with the same email re-checks the membership immediately. The site also re-checks by itself once a day, when someone is working in the administrator.
• To deactivate, clear the email and save. The site stops receiving updates; your menu and its settings aren't touched.
• What is sent to cybersalt.com: the email you enter, a SHA-256 hash of it, your site's domain name and a random installation ID the plugin creates. Nothing about your articles or visitors is sent.
• Activation only changes this package's own update entry in Joomla. Other extensions' update servers are left alone.

How filtering works on your site

When a visitor clicks B, the same category page reloads with the letter added to the address, for example https://example.com/artists?letter=B. It works the same with Joomla's search-engine-friendly URLs switched on or off. The button for the letter being viewed shows in the Active colours.

Troubleshooting

Known limitations

• Only A to Z and 0 to 9 have buttons. A title that starts with anything else, such as a quotation mark or other punctuation, or a letter outside the English alphabet like Æ, Ø or Å, usually won't appear under any button. Accented letters such as É are often grouped with their plain letter, but that depends on how your site's database is set up. If this affects you, the simplest fix is to adjust those titles so they start with a plain letter.
• It filters by title only. It doesn't filter by author, tag, custom field or article text.
• It works on Joomla article categories only. Contacts, other components' category pages and third-party content types aren't covered.

Questions people ask

Does it change the order of my articles? No. Sort Order only changes the order of the buttons. Article order is set on your category menu item, the same as without the extension.

Will it slow my site down? Not noticeably. The filter adds one condition to the article query Joomla already runs, and the menu itself needs at most one small category lookup.

Does it work on Joomla 6? Yes. It runs natively on Joomla 5 and Joomla 6.

Does it work with my template? It should. The buttons are a plain list of links styled by the module's own settings, so they fit into any template position. If your template's styles override the buttons, use the Custom CSS tab.

Which languages is the admin available in? English, Dutch, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Polish, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Turkish, Greek, Czech, Swedish, and Norwegian (Bokmål and Nynorsk). Each administrator sees their own language.

Getting help

Questions, bug reports and ideas are welcome through the Cybersalt support request form.

Cybersalt 0-9 and A-Z Menu is developed by Cybersalt Consulting Ltd. and released under the GNU General Public License v2 or later.