Chapter 5. Small Sites, Big Sites – Organizing Your Content Effectively

In the previous chapter, you learned that creating a website in Joomla revolves around three major tasks: designing a layout, creating content, and adding extras. The central part is, of course, creating content. You can have a Joomla site using a simple default template and you can have a site without adding extra functionality, but you can't have a site without content. That's why, in the following chapters, we will concentrate more on managing and creating content. Then, we will work on the layout and add extras.

In this chapter, you will learn the following topics:

• Building on the example site

• Grouping content – a crash course on site organization

• Creating categories and subcategories

• Displaying main categories and subcategories on your site

• Refining your site's structure

• Using tags to label and organize content

Building on the example site

The CORBA site that you developed in the previous chapter is a great little site, and it is perfectly suited for your client's initial purpose as their first web presence. Now, it's time to make room for growth. Your client has a big pile of information on bad art that they want to present to the public. You are asked to design a site framework that makes it easy to add more content, while at the same time keeps it easy for visitors to quickly find their way through the site.

Can you do that? You most certainly can! Joomla allows you to build sites of all sorts and sizes, whether they consist of just a few pages or thousands of pages. If you plan ahead and start with a sound basic structure, you will be rewarded with a site that is easy to maintain and extend. In this chapter, we will review the site you have just built and look at the different ways in which the content can be structured and rearranged, if required.

Grouping content – a crash course on site organization

To lay the groundwork for your site, you won't use Joomla. The back of a napkin will do fine. Draw up a plan: a site map showing the primary content chunks and their relationships. View your site from a user's perspective. What do you think your visitors will primarily look for, and how can you help them find things quickly and easily?

Designing a site map

To create a site map, first collect all the information that you plan on having on your website and organize it into a simple and logical format. Let's take another look at the CORBA website you built in the previous chapter. The following diagram shows a basic outline of the site you have created so far:

As far as site maps go, this is a very basic one. News, Art Lectures, and Club Meetings are categories that hold several articles on these three topics. Mission is a basic web page (an article). Contact Us is a contact form page. This structure was good enough to start with, but it won...

Time for action – creating a future-proof site map

Let's make some room for growth. Imagine your client is planning to expand the site and add new content. They have come up with the following list of subjects they want to add to their site:

• A few pages to introduce the founding members of CORBA

• Facts on bad art, such as history, techniques, and so on

• Reviews of bad art, bad art galleries, and so on

• General information on club activities other than lectures and meetings

What's the best way to organize things? Let's figure out which content fits which type of container:

1. The information on CORBA founders fits in a new category, About CORBA. This will be a category containing just a few articles. Apart from an article on CORBA founders, the existing uncategorized Mission Statement article can be moved in this category too. The new outline of the site is shown in the following diagram:

   

2. Up to now, we created content groups that are just one-level deep—categories that hold articles. However, Joomla categories...

Creating categories and subcategories

Let's log in to Joomla again and turn to the first step in the task list outlined in the previous steps about creating content containers. In the previous chapter, you had a taste of how you create categories in Joomla. It's pretty straightforward and the same goes for creating categories within categories (called subcategories or nested categories). Let's find out how this works for our example site.

Time for action – creating a category and subcategories

We've seen that the CORBA site could do with some extra content containers. We've already outlined what categories are needed on paper, so, let's add the first new category, About CORBA:

1. Navigate to Content | Category Manager | Add New Category.

2. In the Category Manager: Add A New Articles Category screen, fill out the Title field. In this example, type About CORBA:

   

3. Leave the other values unchanged and click on Save & Close. You're taken to the Category Manager screen. The About CORBA category is now shown in the Category Manager list.

According to our site map, the next few categories we need are nested: one main category (Bad Art) containing two subcategories (Facts and Reviews). We will add them as follows:

1. In the Category Manager screen, click on New.

2. In the Category Manager: Add A New Articles Category screen, fill out the Title field with the name Bad Art.

3. Click on Save & New. This button makes it easier to create a series of...

Displaying main categories and subcategories on your site

Categories are content containers; they tell Joomla how to group things in the backend. Now, how do you get the content in these containers to show up on your website? You have already seen in Chapter 4, Web Building Basics – Creating a Site in an Hour, that one way to do this is by adding a menu link of the Category Blog type. In the previous chapter, you have already added menu links to the Lectures and Meetings categories in the same manner.

Let's start creating menu links that points to categories in some more detail. How do you go about creating a menu link to display the content of the new Activities main category (top-level category) and its subcategories?

Time for action – creating a link to point to a main category

Follow the ensuing steps to create a menu link that points to a category:

1. Navigate to Menus | Main Menu and click on New.

2. The Menu Manager: New Menu Item screen opens. In the Menu Item Type section, navigate to Articles | Category Blog.

3. In the Choose a category drop-down list, select Activities.

4. Enter a Menu Title (that is, Activities).

5. Click on Save & Close.

As you can see in the following screenshot, Activities now shows up as the last menu item in the Menu Items manager. The order in which menu items are presented here is the same order they will have in the Main Menu list on your website. If you would like to move the Activities link up in the Main Menu list, just click on the three little blocks in the ordering column to drag-and-drop any menu item to the desired position. (The ordering column is the one on the left-hand side with two little blue triangles pointing up and down in the top row.) In this example, we will leave...

Refining your site structure

You probably won't get your site structure right in one go unless you have got a really simple, really static site. Is that a bad thing? No, it isn't—because websites evolve and Joomla makes it easy to start with a provisional structure and change things when needed. Maybe there is new content available that has to go into a new category; or maybe because when you are actually adding content, you learn that your well-organized site isn't altogether logical after all. That's fine; keeping a close eye on the structure of your website is a continuous process. Luckily, categories, once defined, can be changed easily without any consequences for the articles they may contain. You've seen how easy it is to add new ones, and it's equally simple to move content from one category to another.

Time for action – moving content from one category to another

The main Activities category contains a couple of articles that you may want to move to the News category. Let's clean up the Activities - Meetings category and move anything topical into the News category:

1. Navigate to Content | Article Manager. From the list, select the items you want to move from the Meetings category to the News category. In this example, we've selected one article:

   

2. Click on the Batch button. A pop-up box called Batch process the selected articles appears. In the Select Category for Move/Copy drop-down box, select the target category: News. Once you are done, click on Process:

   

3. The following message is displayed: Batch process completed successfully. In the Article Manager screen, the selected article is now part of the News category:

   

What just happened?

You've faced the real life challenge of content management! Now, you're not only able to create a sound content structure for your website, but you also know how...

Time for action – renaming a category

On your client's website, there's an Activities category. Your client wants to make it clear that this site section is not about activities organized by other art societies—it's only about CORBA. So, you could change the name of the section to CORBA Activities, as explained in the following steps:

1. Navigate to Content | Category Manager and click on the title of the Activities section to open it for editing.

2. In the edit screen, change the Title to CORBA Activities, as shown in the screenshot:

   

3. In the Alias field, remove the existing alias (remember, the Alias is Joomla's internal name for the article used to create user-friendly URLs). Leave this box blank; Joomla will fill it with CORBA activities when you apply or save your changes. You can check that now by clicking on Save. You will notice the Alias box is filled out automatically.

4. Click on Close. In Category Manager, the new title and alias are displayed.

What just happened?

By changing a category name...

Using tags to label and organize content

Since Joomla 3.1, there's an additional way to organize articles. Apart from using categories, you can now use content tags to classify articles (and other content, even categories themselves). This way, you provide the visitor with alternative means to find groups of content—not just by browsing content categories, but also exploring tagged content. Tags are displayed with every tagged content item; each tag will automatically link to a list of all content labeled with the same tag. Moreover, it's possible to assign as many tags as you like to any article—whereas, you can assign articles to just one category.

Both categories and tags are ways to group content. Moreover, both can be used as links to those groups of content; the visitor can browse content by category or tag. So what's the difference between categories and tags? Categories divide your site content in broad sections, whereas tags offer more precision in classifying content. A helpful...

Time for action – creating a tag

Let's create a tag called Abstract Art and add it to several articles that are about this type of art (regardless of the category they're in) by performing the following steps. This way, visitors can see all related abstract art content just by clicking on that tag.

1. Go to Content | Article Manager and click on an existing article to open it. In this example, I've opened the Bad Abstract Paintings Lecture article.

2. To the right of the editor text area, there's a Tags text field. Here, you can enter and create a new tag. Start typing the words Abstract Art, as shown in the following screenshot:

   

3. Make sure to end the tag text by hitting the Enter key. Congratulations, you've created your first tag! The tag is now displayed as shown in the following screenshot:

   

4. Click on Save & Close to return to Article Manager.

5. We will also assign the Abstract Art tag to an article in another category: Reviews. If you don't yet have any articles in the Reviews category, create...

Summary

In Chapter 3, First Steps – Getting to Know Joomla!, you learned that Joomla retrieves content from a database, block by block. Together, these blocks form a web page. That's why you begin building a site by creating categories; you start with the core of the site—a well-organized content database. In this chapter, we've learned what it takes to create content categories and build a future-proof framework for site content.

Specifically, you learned that every website, big or small, requires planning. It all starts with creating a logical site map reflecting the structure of the content you have in mind. Keep it lean and clean. Bear in mind that visitors will want to get to the content they're looking for as fast as possible. To transfer your hand-drawn site map to a working Joomla site, first identify the different Joomla content elements in it. This will help you build the site step by step.

The main content containers are categories and subcategories. You will create these first...