Multi-Author Joomla Blog with Astroid (Pt 02)

This is part two of our epic series, building a multi-author Joomla blog with native ACL and Astroid. It picks up where we left off with our two bloggers from Part 1. One of them moves fully frontend-only, and the site has to hold that boundary properly, not just hide a menu link and hope. That is the episode's real story. It runs on core Joomla start to finish. The video covers all of that in full, this post just walks through the Astroid moments inside it. Speaking of Astroid, with it on board, a handful of carefully applied settings turns one category blog layout into three completely different pages.

It is exactly this kind of seamless integration between Astroid and Joomla that, at least in my eyes, can help you take your Joomla website to the next level.

One Setting, Two Regions

Open a category blog menu item (Menus, then the item, then the Blog Layout tab) and Joomla gives you two numbers: Leading Articles and Intro Articles. There is nothing Astroid about this tab. It is there whether or not the Astroid Framework is installed. Set Leading to 8 and Intro to 0 and you get one long list, same formatting top to bottom.

The Astroid layer sits one tab across, in Blog Options, flagged with its usual small dot. Here you get an image position for each of those two groups separately: six choices in total, Top, Left, Right, Zigzag, Bottom, or Default, though the video keeps it simple and sticks to left, right, and default. Set the lead position to right and the intro position to left and the shape becomes obvious: the page is not one setting, it is two regions stacked on top of each other, each one dressed independently. Top region, bottom region. That is the whole trick.

Once the page reads as two regions rather than one setting, the practical version is obvious: a small number of leading articles up top in a magazine-style layout, a longer list of intro articles underneath in a plainer one. Same category, one page, two distinct treatments, no extra fields to maintain.

Three Categories, One Handful of Settings

The video pushes this further with three categories, Chess, Monopoly, and Mahjong, sitting side by side on the same menu, each one wearing the same small set of options in a different combination.

Chess maxes out the leading group and leaves intro empty, one column, everything formatted the same way top to bottom. Monopoly flips it entirely: leading empty, intro full, two columns instead of one, image position mirrored to the opposite side. Same mechanism, opposite ends of it.

Mahjong is the interesting one, because it actually uses both regions at once rather than maxing out either end. A couple of leading articles up top with images on the left, a longer intro list underneath with images on the right. Honestly, Heinrich set this one up, and whether there's method to his madness, I just don't know. It is the most complex-looking of the three pages, and it is built from exactly the same handful of fields as the other two, just balanced differently.

Worth a small note if you go this route yourself: once you start mixing single-column and two-column sections on the same category, an image that was framed for the wide layout can look cramped in the narrower one. Nothing Astroid does wrong there, just a reminder that a layout change is also an image-crop decision. By the way, there is an actual fix for this rather than just living with it: the same tab has a separate width control per device, and the rule of thumb is a smaller width, something like 4/12 or 5/12, for left/right images, full width for top or bottom ones.

The Load-Bearing Part

The permissions and workflow that let two bloggers share this site properly, one frontend-only, one still in the backend, run on core Joomla alone. No Astroid tab, no dot, nothing to click that Astroid added. That is deliberate. The layout options are the polish; the access control underneath has to hold regardless of how the page is dressed.

One small detail worth flagging here: Joomla 6.1 added a genuinely new feature that makes the frontend-only side of this split work cleanly, a Current User filter on an author's own content list, so each blogger automatically sees only their own work. Small setting, but it is the kind of native touch that makes a proper multi-author split feel like something Joomla is building for on purpose, not just tolerating.

Looking Ahead

This is part two of a planned three-part series. Part three picks up the thread this post leaves open on purpose: promoting one of the two bloggers to editor. Joomla will carry that story the same way it carried this one, permissions doing the real work. Astroid's job stays exactly what it has been all series, not the story itself, but what dresses it.

Check out the full tutorial on YouTube. Find Out More About Astroid HERE.