Winnipeg Web Design

Joomla Series Part 1: Organizing Your Content.

Joomla is a great way to jump start projects with vast amounts of content.  Joomla is a content management system great for portals, and newsletter sites.  Three of the most important things to learn in regards to Joomla are:

1. Organizing Content
2. Creating menus / navigation
3. Creating a Template

Today I will be starting a series on the above 3 points.  Let’s get started by looking at the 2 ways of organizing content in Joomla.

• Uncategorized
• Broken into sections, and categories

Uncategorized should only be used for small sites that will not have large chunks of content.  If everything is uncategorized it will be tough to find specific articles and everything will be a jumbled mess.  This is where sections and categories come in.  They provide logical groups of content that are in some way related.

Below is a quick explanation of sections, categories, and articles from a book titled Joomla! A User’s Guide: Building a Successful Joomla! Powered Website:

Sections

The highest tier of the Joomla content hierarchy is made up of sections. The best way to think of sections is as containers that provide the largest set of items in the hierarchy. Sections are the parents of categories. A section can have one or more children (categories). A section can also be an empty set with no children (categories), but in that case, it will not be visible to site visitors.

Categories

Categories make up the middle tier of the hierarchy. Categories are children of their parent sections. A category must be assigned to a section; it cannot exist without one. Categories are also the parents of content items. A category can have one or more children (content items). A category can also be an empty seat with no children (content items), but as with a section with this setup, it will not be visible to site visitors.

Articles

Content articles are the lowest tier of the hierarchy and are the most important. They are what most people think of as “pages” of their website—that is, content articles are what you create to add content to display to site visitors. A content article must be assigned to a category; it cannot exist without one.

Example

Let’s use an example of a services page to illustrate breaking up of content into sections and categories.

• Services [section]
  • Content Management Systems [category]
    • Why you need a CMS! [article]
    • What software should you use? [article]
  • Search Engine Optimization [category]
    • Link Building [article]
    • Finding Target Keywords[article]
  • Custom Web Design [category]
    • Last site we built was for… [article]
    • Personal Sites [article]
    • Business Sites [article]

In the above we have a clear hierarchy of information which will appear on a sample services page.  You can imagine if all our service articles would be thrown together it would be a tangled mess.

Conclusion

I know when I first started learning Joomla organizing the content kind of overwhelmed me at first.  I hope this brief explanation of sections, categories and articles has helped you immensely!

Related posts:

1. Joomla vs. Drupal vs. Custom CMS
2. WordPress: More than just a blogging platform?
3. Part 4: SEO and Content Development
4. Build a Content Slider with jQuery
5. Excluding WordPress Categories from RSS Feed

Tags: content, joomla

Written by Brenley Dueck