Using Joomla

Chapter 6. Creating Content

Since Joomla is a content management system, it goes without saying that content is at the heart of everything it does. The primary content type in Joomla is the article. In this chapter, we’ll explore articles in depth as the basis for understanding how Joomla organizes content as a whole. While the Joomla workflow may not appear logical at first, the more you use it, the more you’ll understand why things are set up the way they are.

Articles As Building Blocks

Articles are the main building blocks of your site and they are used in one of two ways:

• A page on your website may consist of a single article. As users navigate your website, they view one article at a time on each page.

• A page on your website may consist of multiple articles. As users navigate your website, each page they see contains several articles (e.g., an entire section or category of articles). These might be full articles or just a teaser extract that requires users to click a “Read more…” link to view the entire article.

Most sites will likely use a combination of both of these options to display articles.

The Article Manager (shown in Figure 6-1) is the tool for creating and managing articles.

Figure 6-1. The Article Manager with sample content

We’ll break down the interface into a few key areas:

Top Toolbar

The toolbar in the upper-right area contains the tools you’ll most commonly use with ...