Introduction

In this video we'll take a look at all the Settings available in Quick Index and how they change the behaviour and functionality of Quick Index.

In the previous videos we have already seen how to install Quick Index and what the features are for the free and pro version of the extension.

But that was just scratching the surface of what we can do with it.

Quick Index is a System Plugin. So you can find all the settings inside the Plugin Manager.

We now have the latest version of Quick Index installed, which at the moment is version [latest]. And what you see here is a Joomla [latest] setup. If you are using newer versions, things might look a bit different.

And, as you can see, we have the Pro version installed. Some features and settings are only available in the Pro version. I will mention that when discussing those settings.

All we see here is just a short description of the extension. And on the right here, we have the general plugin settings that every plugin has.

The Quick Index settings are in these different tabs.

All settings have a short description you can see when hovering over the title. That should give you enough information to know what a setting does.

Now, the default settings are fine for most setups. So you probably don't need to change any. But in some cases you will want to change the default behaviour of Quick Index.

Only change settings if you understand what they are for and how they affect the behaviour of the extension.

Styling

Let's start with the 'Styling' settings.

As we have seen in the previous videos, by default Quick Index is surrounded with a grey block style.

This is because the "div" tag around the index gets a default Class Name of "well".

The "well" class is styled by Bootstrap, so if you have a template using Bootstrap, you will also see this grey block styling.

However, you are free to give the index any class name you want. You can change this right here via this "Class name" setting.

And with these other settings, you can also configure the class names given to other elements. You can change the class for the List tag... the Heading tags in the content... and in the Pro version, also the class name for the numbers that can be added to the headings.

With these class names settings, you have full freedom to style the index however you want via CSS.

Behaviour

Most of the settings available in the Behaviour tab are exclusive to the Pro version of Quick Index.

The first one allows us to enter a title that will be placed at the top of the index list. For example, let's enter "Table of Contents".

Upon filling in the Title, as you can see a new setting will appear below. Here, we can select the heading tag to use for the title. Let's select H1.

And now we have our title added at the top of the index.

We'll just remove the title again.

We have touched upon the "Minimum Index Level" and "Maximum Index Level" in the previous video.

We have seen how we can customise the depth of Headings we want to include in the Index, directly within the {index} tag.

Well, these settings allow to set the default preference for that. So if you usually want to include only headings up to H3, you can simply set the "Maximum" to h3. And of course, you will still be able to override this manually for individual index tags.

What about these two next settings here? "Minimum and Maximum Headings Level" allow us to separately control whether we want to add anchors and class names to the headings in the content.

For example, you might want to only include 2 levels in the Index, but add anchors and number prefixes to all the headings in the content. With Quick Index Pro, you can do that too.

The "Ordered List" setting is the only one in this tab that is also available in the Free version.

In previous videos we have also seen how to choose between a numbered list or a bullet list directly within the {index} tag.

Similarly to the level settings above, this setting allows us to determine our default choice. So if we set this to "No"...

And we don't specify a preference in a single index tag...

The Index type will follow this setting. As you can see it's now a bullet list.

With the "Ordered List" set to "Yes" instead, the list will use the numbers instead of bullets. In the Pro version we can also set a default numbering style for the ordered list.

We can make the index use numbers, letters or roman numerals, both in uppercase and lowercase format.

And also with the Pro version of Quick Index, we can even set the style individually for each level of the Index.

Here is an example of how that could look like.

Tag Syntax

These next settings determine what plugin tag syntax Quick Index should use.

As we know by now, the default syntax for generating an Index is the word 'index' inside 'curly braces'. And the syntax to not show headings from certain block of content is a 'noindex' tag, again in 'curly braces'.

In most cases we don't have to change these. But there are cases where you might find the syntax conflicts with other extensions you have installed. In that case a solution can be to change the syntax of the Quick Index tags.

But keep in mind: Changing these settings will mean that any existing use of Quick Index using the old syntax will not work anymore.
So it is best to change this before starting to use Quick Index in your site.

Just to show you, we'll change the tag word to 'toc'... (pronounced: t.o.c.). And let's use square brackets instead.

We'll just insert a new Index under our old one by using the newly defined syntax.

As we can see, our old syntax doesn't work anymore.

Advanced

Finally, we have the Advanced tab.

In the "Getting Started" video, we have seen how it's possible to exclude a specific heading from the index, by giving it a class name of "noindex".

With this setting, we can change the class names that produce this effect. We can add multiple class names, separated with a comma. Headings with any of these class name will not be included in the index.

This next setting is something we haven't seen in action yet. We can make certain items in the index show up as bigger titles, instead of simple list items. We control this via class names as well. The default is "index-title".

So for example, let's give a class name of "index-title" to the Fruits and Animals headings. We'll do that via this html view in the article editor. So one class here… And another here.

Here is what the result looks like. Now Fruits and Animals are displayed as titles instead of simple items of the list.

Similarly to the setting above, we can give a comma separated list of class names here as well.

When showing a title in the index, it will appear with the same heading that is using in the content. But we can offset the heading tag inside the index to a smaller heading. For instance, if offset is set to 2, a Heading 1 in the content, will appear as a Heading 3 in the index.

The "Add Links" setting is simply what makes the index automatically link to the headings in the content. It's obviously turned on by default. But for whatever reason you want to switch links off, you can.

This will result in a plain list of headings, without them linking to anything.

"Add Links to Headings", on the other hand, is an extra feature to make the headings themselves hyperlinked. Let's see what happens when we turn this on.

Now, the Headings themselves have links pointing to their own anchors.

This could be useful to quickly access anchor link of the headings, directly from the content.

With the Pro version of Quick Index, we can also add numbers to the headings in the content.

If we turn this setting to yes, the Headings will be prepended with the correspondent numbering that appears in the index.

The default separator between the number and the heading text is a dot, but we can change this to something else. Like a parenthesis or whatever you want.

The next three settings deal with the customisation of the anchor IDs, and are also exclusive to the Pro version.

This will add the numbers to the anchor links.

So lets click on "beagle". As you can see here, the url now includes the leading number of the heading too. This number corresponds with the full number from the index.

And we can also make the anchor links use parents.

What does that mean? As you can see, normally, the anchor URL simply has the name of the heading in it. So, just "beagle".

But if we add the Parents to the IDs...

Now the link includes the parent heading names as well. As you can see it now made up of the words "animals", "dogs", and then "beagle".

And it's also possible to prevent certain words to be used in the anchor links. For example, we might not want short words such as "and" or "the" to be included in these link names. Here we can list all those words, separating them with a comma.

And here you see the word "and" is now not part of the anchor link name.

Next, we have a couple of Security Options, which are also exclusive the Pro version. With these settings below, we can disable the use of Quick Index in certain components. We can decide whether we want to just disable the functionality, or to remove the syntax altogether.

And the last option we have is this 'Place HTML comments'.

Let's look at the html output inserted with Quick Index. Here, we can see the output generated by Quick Index is surrounded by this start and end comment tag.

There are also cases when the Index has no output. In those cases, there will be extra comments here telling you why there is no output, so they can be very useful.

If these comment tags cause issues with the surrounding content where you are using the Quick Index tags...

then you can disable these comment tags here.

And those are all the settings for Quick Index.

Recap

So, in this video we have seen where to find the Settings that control Quick Index and how those affect the way the extension works.

You can find a list of all the settings, including their description in the Quick Index tutorial.

Stay tuned for other videos that look more in depth at specific functionalities.