A blog view shows several articles on one page: a category, a selection, the featured articles. Corpus adds no settings of its own to lay it out, everything is set on the menu item, using Joomla's own options.
That is deliberate. A setting added by a template disappears the day you change template; a Joomla option does not.
Where the settings are
Menus → your menu item → Blog Layout tab.
The four settings that decide the structure
Leading Articles. How many articles are featured at the top of the page. Zero, one, or more. They are laid out differently from the rest: from one onwards, Corpus puts the image on the left and the text on the right.
Intro Articles. How many articles follow, shown as cards.
# Columns. How many columns those cards are spread across.
Multi Column Order. How they are read, and this is not a presentation detail:
- Across, left to right, then down to the next row. Every card in a row has the same height.
- Down, top to bottom, one column after another. Each card keeps its own height and the columns balance out. This is what is usually called a masonry layout.
In both cases the reading order on screen is the document order: someone using a keyboard or a screen reader follows exactly the same path as the eye.
On narrow screens every layout falls back to a single column. Three columns on a phone are not three columns, they are three strips two words wide.
The layout classes
Two fields on the same tab accept keywords:
- Leading Article Class: for the full-width articles;
- Article Class: for the cards below.
These keywords are Cassiopeia's, the template shipped with Joomla. Corpus reuses them on purpose: if you have built a Joomla 4 site before, there is nothing new to learn.
These keywords only apply while no blog template is assigned. As soon as a category receives one, it is the template that says where the image goes, and
image-left,image-rightandimage-alternateno longer act on that category's articles. Other categories are unaffected.Corpus ships three blog templates that do the same thing under a name you can remember: Image on the left, Image on the right, Image below. See the Blog templates chapter.
| Keyword | What it does |
|---|---|
image-left |
Image on the left, text on the right |
image-right |
The other way round |
image-alternate |
Combine with either one: every other card flips |
image-bottom |
Image below the text |
boxed |
Card inside a frame |
They combine, separated by spaces:
image-left image-alternate boxedTwo things to know.
Side by side only makes sense with a single column of cards. If you ask for three columns, splitting each card in two leaves room to read neither the image nor the text: Corpus then puts the image back on top. That is not a limitation of the template, it is a question of available width.
image-alternate counts the cards on screen, not the articles in the category. On page two the alternation therefore starts again on the same side as on page one.
Image alignment
Every article has an Alignment field for its intro image, the Images and Links tab of the article, or globally on the menu item.
In many templates this setting floats the image and the text wraps around it. Corpus does not. Text wrapped around an image falls apart when zoomed and becomes unreadable on a phone, and where the image sits is a matter for the layout of the list, not for each article taken on its own. Use image-left or image-right on the menu item instead.
What Corpus draws without being asked
- The article title carries the rule.
- The link is on the title, never on the whole card: a link must announce itself by its own text, and a fully clickable card can no longer be selected with the keyboard or the mouse.
- Pagination sits at the bottom, with drawn arrows and the current page announced, it is not a link to itself.
Previous / next article
These two links do not come from the template but from the Content - Page Navigation plugin, which you enable under System → Plugins. They appear at the foot of the article and follow the order of the category.
Corpus shows the title of the destination article, with "Previous article" or "Next article" above it.
The plugin itself only shows "Prev" and "Next", and tucks the real title away in text reserved for screen readers. In other words: a blind visitor knew where the link led, a sighted one did not. That is the wrong way round, and two links both labelled "Next" on one page cannot be understood out of context, WCAG 2.4.4.
The card, and doing without it
By default every article in a blog view, the leading one included, is drawn as a card: hairline rule, rounded corner, light shadow, inner padding. That is what Corpus's design shows.
To remove it, write no-card in Article Class or Leading Article Class. The name comes from Joomla: it is already the name of the frameless module style, and Cassiopeia reuses it. There was no reason to invent a third word for the same idea.
Without the frame the inner padding goes too: the text then lines up with the image and with the rest of the page. The image takes back the rounded corner the card was carrying for it.
boxed and corpus-encadre are still accepted but no longer do anything: they ask for the frame, which is now the default.
Up to date for Corpus 2.1.43.