Joomla - Category Blog Alternative Layout Not Being Applied

Question

So I'm a little confused by Joomla's Alternative Layout overrides.

I'm using Joomla 3.3

I have read all Joomla 3.x documentation, and have followed many tutorials without any luck.

So here are my template files:

Promo is the name of the alternative layout which I would like to activate for one of my Category Pages.

So it appears as an alternative layout without a problem.

Then I've gone ahead and made the menu item:

However when I go on the page, it calls the blog.php override only and not the promo.php layout

What am I doing wrong here?

Answer 1

Where is your promo.xml file? You should have one in the same directory where you have your promo.php file. The promo.xml file should be a copy of the blog.xml file located under the public_html/components/com_content/views/category/tmpl folder. You will only need to change the line:

<layout title="COM_CONTENT_CATEGORY_VIEW_BLOG_TITLE" option="COM_CONTENT_CATEGORY_VIEW_BLOG_OPTION">

to

<layout title="promo" option="promo">

And then when you create a menu item, choose its type to be promo.