Up and Running with Joomla, 2nd Edition

Organizing Your Content

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.

Figure 11. Sections and categories

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 ...