Time for action – move content from one category to another
The Activities section contains some articles that you might want to move to the News section. Let’s clean up the Activities – Meetings category and move anything topical into the News – General News category:
- Navigate to Content | Article Manager. From the list, select the items you want to move from the Meetings category to the General News category. In this example, we’ve selected two articles:
- Click on Move on the toolbar. You’ll be taken to the Move Articles screen:
- In the Move to Section/Category list, select News/General News. At the far right-hand side, you can check which articles are being moved.
- Click on Save. In the Article Manager screen, the three articles are now part of the News section. You can check this by clicking on the News link on the frontend Main Menu.
What just happened?
You’ve stood 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 to improve on it. By adding a new container for all news items and moving existing news content there you’ve now made room for growth on the SRUP site.
Have a go hero – moving entire categories
Sometimes you might want to move an entire category and all its contents to another section. Try this out for yourself-it’s not much different from moving articles. Imagine you’d like to move the Reviews category from the Ugly Paintings section to another section. In the Category Manager, select the category you want to move and click on the Move button. Select the section you want to move things to, and click on Save. It’s just as straightforward to move the entire category including all of its article contents back again. This flexibility is great when you’re setting up or rearranging your site.
Renaming sections or categories
As we’ve just seen, Joomla! allows you to easily rearrange your site structure and its contents. You can also rename sections and categories that already contain articles; no content will be lost.
Time for action – rename a section
On your client’s website there’s an Activities section. Your client wants to make it clear this section is not about activities organized by other art societies-it’s only about SRUP. Could you please change the name of the section to SRUP Activities? It’s a breeze.
- Navigate to Content | Section Manager and click on the title of the Activities section to open it for editing.
- In the Section: [Edit] screen, change the Title to SRUP Activities.
- In the Alias: field, remove the existing alias (remember, the Alias is Joomla!’s internal name for the article used when creating user-friendly URLs). Leave this box blank; Joomla! will fill it with srup-activities when you apply or save your changes. You can check that now by clicking on Apply. You’ll notice the Alias box is filled out automatically.
- Click on Save.
What just happened?
By changing a section or category name, all of Joomla!’s internal references to the name are updated automatically. All articles and categories in the renamed section will reflect the changes you made. In the Article Manager, for example, all items that belonged to the Activities section are now updated to show they are in the SRUP Activities section. No manual labor here and more importantly, nothing is lost!
On the frontend, the new section name shows up on the section overview page when the user clicks on the Activities link:
Have a go hero – name and rename!
Using appropriate, short, and descriptive labels for sections and categories (and for the menu links pointing to them) is really essential. After all, these are the words that guide your visitors to the content you want them to discover. It’s a good idea to tweak these labels until you’re perfectly happy with them. To modify the names of categories, navigate to the Category Manager; it’s similar to changing section names. Maybe you would like to change menu link labels too, as these don’t automatically change with the category or section name. Try to find short and appropriate menu link labels. To change menu link labels, navigate to the Main Menu, select any of the menu items and change what’s in the Title field (that is, SRUP Activities).
When changing Titles (of Sections/Categories/Menu Link Items) make sure to clear the contents of the Alias box. Joomla! will automatically create an Alias for the new Title.
Changing section and category settings
You’ve already created a good deal of sections and categories without altering any of the default settings. In some cases, however, you might want some more control over the section or category you’re editing. In the table below you can see the options that are available in the Section/Category: [New] or Section/Category: [Edit] screen.
Basically, you can customize these settings for two purposes:
- To determine whether a section or category is visible (and which user groups can see it)
- To add a short descriptive text whenever the section or category contents are displayed.
We’ll cover both the Section and Category edit screen in the overview next, as all settings and options are identical. The only difference is that when adding a category, Joomla! wants you to specify the section that holds the new category.
This is what the Section: [New] and the Category: [New] screen look like:
