A new client called us and told us that a newly created menu of his, which is created out of another menu, does not work. He said that none of the links work in the new menu, despite the fact that they work in the other menu.
So we looked into the issue and we immediately found the cause of the problem, each one of the menu items in the new menu was pointing to a menu item of type “External URL”. That’s the cause of the problem!
If you have a menu item of type “External URL”, you can’t create a menu item alias pointing to it (the same way you can’t create a menu item alias pointing to another menu item alias). You will need to create another menu item of type “External URL” and point directly to that URL.
But why can’t Joomla automatically point the menu item alias to the external URL?
The short answer is that it’s a bug in Joomla (and this is explained in details in the above link). The problem though is that if you ever decide to change one of those external URLs, you will have to change it in each menu item pointing to it, and not in just one menu item. We know, this is annoying, and we hope that Joomla will get this sorted out in the future. But for now, your only option is to just duplicate the menu item and assign it to the other menu that you wish to use it in.
If you have the same problem, and if our post above didn’t help solve your problem, then try clearing your Joomla cache. If this is still an issue, then please contact us and we’ll solve the problem for you in no time and for a very, very affordable fee!