Learning the Basics Hierarchy of Content
| Hierarchy of Content |
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| Written by Administrator |
| Monday, 13 October 2008 06:39 |
The Joomla content management system can be a little confusing for most people. There's not much available that really explains how hierarchy of content is structured. It takes the newbie quite a while of messing around before he can figure out what it's doing. In this "article", I will explain it in simple terms.
SectionsThe First Level of CategorizationUnder "Content" > "Section Manager", you can build a list of Sections. These are supposed to be the broadest divisions of your site. Usually there are only 4-6 sections on a normal website. Some examples are... "About Us", "Products", "News", etc. Creating all of the sections needs to be the first step to building content on your Joomla website. CategoriesThe Second Level of CategorizationUner "Content" > "Category Manager", you can build a list of Categories. Categories sub-divide Sections into more specific divisions. For example, if "Products" is a Section, then within it, you can make Categories for each product. Once you have all of your Categories in place, you then have all of your organization setup, and you can move on to the actual content - Articles. ArticlesIndividual "Pieces" of ContentUnder "Content" > "Article Manager", you can create and edit a list of Articles. Articles simply are pieces of content, meaning text and pictures or custom HTML. An article can be a page, story, press release, news flash, etc. You assign each Article to a Category (which is within a Section). Articles can be the most confusing part about the Content hierarchy in Joomla. In most cases, you can think of an article as the content (text and pictures) on a page. It is very easy to associate "Articles" with "Pages", but beware... they were named "Articles" for a reason. Renaming "Articles" to "Pages" is inaccurate, and can lead to more confusion. There is no "Page" terminology in Joomla because many elements work together to form a page. As you will find out later, the closest thing to creating a page is creating a Menu item, but I'll address that there. Anyway, once you have some Articles created, you may notice that you still have an empty website. You can make all of the Sections, Categories, and Articles as you want, but none of it is going to show up on the front-end of the website until you create Menu items. MenusThe Navigational Structure of your WebsiteUnder "Menus" > "Main Menu" (or any additional menus), you can create the navigational structure of your website by adding Menu items. A Menu item both creates a link in the navigation as well as defines what the browser will display once the link is clicked on. When you create a Menu item, you are first asked what you want the page to display. Most of the time, you will click "Article" > "Article Layout". This Menu type will display a single Article on the resulting page. Another common Menu type is "Article" > "Category/Blog Layout". This will display the intro text from all of the Articles that belong to a specified Category... all on one page. This is a good application if you want a page to see a preview of a bunch of articles. Especially useful for a News page, Press Releases page, etc. So as you can see, you can't rename "Articles" to "Pages" because sometimes there are many articles on one page, like when using "Category/Blog Layout". |
| Last Updated on Wednesday, 26 November 2008 14:03 |