One of the best benefits of a CMS is the fact that it organizes its content and makes that organization available throughout the system. If you want a menu on your site that says News, for instance, then you will always want it to show the most recent news. Each time you add a news article, such as a press release, you do not want to have to change the link—you always want it to show articles that have a categorization of news. Joomla accomplishes this organization using two things: Sections and categories.
Sections represent exactly what they sound like—sections of your site. They are reflective of the topmost organization of your site. Categories, on the other hand, are one level down—they further categorize the sections of your site. If you had a section called About Us, for instance, then you may have categories such as History, Management Team, or Office Locations. Figure 11 shows how Sections and categories are organized, as well as how they are related to Uncategorized Content, which are not grouped within Sections or categories and will be covered later.
Warning
Before you can enter a Category, you must first enter the parent Section that the Category will be a part of.
When creating Sections and categories, which can be accessed from the Control Panel in the Joomla Administrator or under the Content menu, there are several options to be aware of:
Publish: tells Joomla whether or not the Section or Category should be published and available for use on the site.
Unpublish: will unpublish the Section or Category for use on the site.
Move (Categories Only): used to move a Category from one Section to another.
Copy: will copy the item from one location to another, such as copying a Category from one Section to another.
Delete: will delete the Section or Category. You will have to delete or reassociate any content associated to the Section or Category before you can delete it.
Edit: allows you to edit the selected the Section or Category.
New: is used to create a new Section or Category.
Before you create Sections and categories, we have some words to the wise about planning.
At first glimpse it appears Sections and categories are easy. For the most part, that is true. But if you do not plan ahead and you end up having the wrong makeup of Sections and categories, you could find yourself making a lot of changes and moving content to address the problem. Moving content is generally just time consuming, but it can have a negative impact on your SEO efforts. It's not impossible to correct, but it teaches you a lesson—plan ahead!
When you plan your site the best advice we can give is probably the opposite of what you might think. We do not recommend you try to enter every possible Section and Category you think you will ever need, but rather only enter the ones you absolutely know you need. Over time add Sections and categories as your site grows or the market demands it. If you find that you need to rename or further breakdown a Section or Category, then it's ok—do a little here and a little there as needed.
To help get you started, in Table 2, we have provided some Sections and Categories commonly seen on various sites.
Table 2. Common Sections and categories
Section | Categories |
|---|---|
About Us |
|
Products | List of products your company offers. If you were Microsoft, for instance, you might have the following:
|
Solutions | If your site will be promoting industry solutions, such as:
|
Industries |
|
Support |
|
News |
|
Resources |
|
Services |
|
Community |
|
As you can see, it is very easy to populate your Sections and categories. Once again, we recommend you start small—only enter the items you know you will need for certain with your initial import of content. We can about assure you that you will end up making some changes once you start entering content and linking to menus, so don't sweat over trying to solve it all right now.
To enter a Section, simply click the Section Manager in the Joomla Administrator Control Panel and then click New. Using the form presented (see Figure 12), enter the following information. This is not everything you can do, but keeping with our Short Cut mentality, it is what 95% of you will care about. For the purpose of this example, let's create a Section called News that is accessible by the Public, is Published, and has no Description.
Title: Put the name of your Section here—in our example right now, it should say News.
Published: This radio button gives you the option to specify if you want the Section published or not.
Access Level: We have not yet covered permissions, but if you wanted to restrict a given Section to a specific group of users, such as Registered users, then this is where you would do it.
Description: This description can be used to provide a general description of what the Section is, or it can contain content you wish to be displayed on your site. We will cover how to control the display of this Description on your site when we go over creating menu items.
After you have entered in all the information you want, click Save to save your new Section.
For the most part, creating Categories is exactly the same as creating Sections—except for one important difference. When you create a Category you must select the name of a previously created Section. This selection option appears right under the Published radio button option as shown in Figure 13.
Following our example of creating a Section called News, create a Category called Press Releases. Once complete, click Save.
With your newfound knowledge of creating Sections and categories, go ahead and enter the ones you know you will need to get set up. Before we move to adding content to your newly created Sections and categories, we have a few more things to cover about the core system. Let's do that now.