How Does Joomla Organize Content Articles? Joomla gives you two options for how to organize all your content articles. Remember that each article is a discrete piece of content; for example, it might be a two-paragraph news announcement about your company. While a small site might only have five to ten articles, a big site could have thousands. The size and complexity of your site are a huge consideration for how to organize your articles.

Let's take a conceptual look at these two organizational options, and then we will see how they apply to our imaginary Joomla website for Widget Inc.

Uncategorized Article

Uncategorized articles are by far the simplest way to organize a Joomla website. As the name implies, there is basically no hierarchical structure. Let's consider an analogy to help us understand. Imagine we are trying to organize a stack of papers on a desk. Each piece of paper represents a single content article, and our website is represented by a filing cabinet next to the desk.If we were to organize our articles as uncategorized, we would simply place them in  a drawer of the filing cabinet. If there aren't many articles, this is a fast and easy way to organize them. I can easily find what I want by just picking up the small stack of papers and flipping through the sheets (that is, following links to the different articles).

Sections and Categories

If I have many more articles than a dozen, using uncategorized articles isn't going to work. If I pick up the stack, I might have to flip through a thousand pieces of paper.

As with almost all Content Management Systems, Joomla provides a hierarchy to organize large amounts of content articles. Joomla offers two levels: the highest is called sections, and below that are categories. In the most general case you will have the kind of structure (sections and categories) shown here.

To return to our filing cabinet analogy, in the cabinet you have drop-down folders, and inside them you have manila folders, and inside those are sheets of paper that are the articles. This is shown in Figure 4.2.

The filing cabinet is the website, the drop-down folders are the sections, the manila folders are the categories, and the papers are the articles.

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.

Sample Hierarchy

Let's say we want to create a website that discusses Classic American Automobiles.

Plan the Sections

Let's also assume that we have decided that one type of automobile we wish to discuss on the website is the Muscle Car group—those big beefy performance autos that were so popular in America in the 1960s and 1970s. We will make this type of automobile our highest tier—a section. So first we create a new section and name it "Muscle Cars."

Plan the Categories

A logical subset of Muscle Cars (parent item) would be a list of the manufacturers who made Muscle Cars. So next we create categories for each manufacturer: Chevrolet, Chrysler, Pontiac, and Ford. We assign each of these categories to the section "Muscle Cars."

Plan the Articles

Now we get to the meat of the matter: Building the pages for each car model. The models of cars are, in other words, the lowest level of our hierarchy. To create pages for each model, we create content items that represent each. We then assign each model (content item) to the proper manufacturer (category). Let's look at one specific category: Ford. For this manufacturer, we want to create pages for each of the following models: Mustang, Fairlane, Falcon, and Galaxy. In this case we create content items for each model and assign each to the category named "Ford."Visually, we have created a content hierarchy that looks like the following:

Let's return to our imaginary widget company and go through two examples of organizing the content using the two methods that were just explained, uncategorized and sections/categories.