Organizing Your Content, As a Content Management System, Joomla's primary function is to organize and present all the content in your site. It does this through content articles. These discrete pieces of content must be organized into a 2-level hierarchy comprised of sections and categories.
In This Post
This post provides an in-depth tutorial that explains how Joomla displays its content articles and how you can organize their hierarchical structure. It details how to plan and organize the content and user experience for the site. It also explains the hierarchy structure currently used in Joomla—sections and categories—and how to best shape content into them for small and large sites.
- How does Joomla generate web pages?
- In what different ways can I present content items?
- How can I organize my content?
- How do components and modules present information?
How Does Joomla Generate Web Pages?
For those new to Joomla, one of the most difficult things to figure out is how content is organized. The relationship between sections, categories, blogs, and tables can be very confusing.
The key to understanding how to organize content is in how Joomla generates pages. I addressed this in detail in post 1, "Content Management Systems and an Introduction to Joomla," and am bringing it up again. If you have a firm grasp of PHP-served dynamic pages, you can skip to How Joomla Organizes its Articles, but if part of your brain still harkens back to static HTML pages, it's worth a quick revisiting!
To get a better idea of how a Joomla site can be organized, let's make a sitemap for an imaginary site. It will be for a company called Widget Inc., which sells widgets in both blue and green. This example could easily be generalized into any sort of "brochure" site for a small company.
A sitemap is a standard planning tool used by web designers and is critical for a Joomla website. It's often shown as a tree diagram that shows all the pages in the site. Figure 4.1 shows an example.
In this sitemap, each web page is represented by a box, and the lines are links within the site. A sitemap represents the architecture (links) of a site rather than its content organization. It is still a useful planning tool for organizing the site, however. In picture above there are seven pages; from an organizational point of view, it seems as if there are four main paths in the site:
- About Us
- Services
- Contact Us
- Widget Blog
The first step in trying to understand how Joomla structures its content is to realize that there are no pages!
OK, so what does that mean?
we talked about the idea of "placeholders" for the content. Remember, the content is stored in the database and needs to be placed onto the pages by Joomla. The Content Management System (CMS) has spaces on its pages to place content, and it needs to know what content it should put there. Joomla only knows what content should be used after the viewer clicks a link. When he has done this, Joomla then knows what page to generate, gets the content, and puts it into place.
Consider a different example—a magazine. You turn to the index, look something up, get the page number and turn to that page. For that page to be filled with content, the magazine author/designer needed to have chosen the content and arranged it as they wanted on that page. So you turn to that page and you see the content. This seems like an overly simple example, but it illustrates clearly how pages are generated in a CMS. On a Joomla site, you click a link (the magazine index), and then the content is generated and arranged on the page. In the magazine example, the pages exist before you go to it, but on a Joomla website, the page only exists as you visit it. Strange but true.
There are two main ways that Joomla generates content:
Components
- Articles (organized in sections and categories or uncategorized)
- Other components such as web links or contacts
Modules
components are presented in the main body of a Joomla web page, usually a big column in the middle. Modules are generally found around the edges of that main body. In this post we look at the task of organizing and presenting the articles. Other components and modules are examined in post 7, "Expanding Your Content: Articles and Editors."
