Organizing your Content Effectively using Joomla 1.5

Building on the example site

It’s time to make room for growth. Your client has a big pile of information on ugly 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 them. If you plan ahead and start with a sound basic structure, you’ll be rewarded with a site that’s easy to maintain and extend. In this article, we’ll review the site you’ve just built and look at the different ways the content can be structured—and rearranged, if need be.

Grouping content: A crash course in 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 site map to lay out 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 fast and easily?

Designing a site map

To create a site map, first collect all information you plan on having on your website and organize it into a simple and logical format.

As site maps come, this is a very basic one. For the most part, it’s just one level deep. Introducing Ugly Paintings and Mission are basic web pages (articles). Activities is a section that allows the visitor to browse two other categories. Contact Us is a contact form page. This structure was good enough for a basic website, but it won’t do if SRUP wants to expand their site.

Time for action – create a future proof site map

Let’s make some room for growth. Imagine your client’s planning to add an indefinite amount of new content, so there’s a need for additional content containers. They have come up with the following list of subjects they want to add to their site:

• News items
• A few pages to introduce the founding members of SRUP
• Reviews on ugly art
• Facts on ugly paintings (history, little known facts, and so on)

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

What just happened?

You’ve laid a solid foundation for your site—on paper. Before you actually start using Joomla! to create sections and categories, create a structure for the content that you have in mind. Basically, no matter how big or small your website is, you’ll organize it just like the example you’ve just seen. You’ll work from top to bottom, from the primary level to the lower levels, defining content groups and their relations. Bear in mind, though, that there will certainly be more than one way to organize your information. Choose an organization that makes sense to you and your visitors, and try to keep things lean and clean. A complex structure will make it harder to maintain the content, and eventually—when building menus—it will make it harder to design clear and simple navigation paths for your visitors.

Tips on choosing sections

Transferring your site map to Joomla!

Let’s have a closer look at our new site map and identify the Joomla! elements. This—and any—Joomla! site is likely to consist of five types of content.

The following are the content types in our SRUP site map:

Basically, that’s all there is to a Joomla! site. When you’ve got your site outlined like this, you won’t meet any surprises while building it. You can transform any amount of content and functionality into a website, step by step.

How do you turn a site map into a website?

If you’ve got your site blueprint laid out, you probably want to start building! Now, what should be the first step? What’s the best, and fastest, way to get from that site map on the back of your napkin to a real-life Joomla! site? In this book, we’ll work in this order:

1. Organize: Create content containers.
   You’ve seen that much of the site map we just created consists of content containers: sections and categories. In this article, we’ll focus on these containers. We’ll create all necessary containers for our example site.
2. Add content: Fill the containers with articles.
   Next, we’ll add articles to the sections and categories. Articles are the “classic content” that most web pages are made of. We should also check for articles that do not belong in any category. Instead of assigning them to a section and a category, we’ll add them as Uncategorized content..
3. Put your contents on display: Create the home page and content overview pages.
   Next, you’ll want to guide and invite visitors. You can achieve this using two special types of pages in the site map, the home page and Joomla!’s section/category overview pages (“secondary home pages”).
4. Make everything findable: Create menus.
   The top level items in your site map will probably end up as menu items on the site. To open up your site to the world you’ll create and customize menus helping visitors to easily navigate your content.

And what about the special content stuff?

You’ll notice that in the above list we’ve summed up all sorts of “classic content”, such as articles, home pages, overview pages, and menus linking it all. We haven’t yet mentioned one essential part of the site map, the special goodies. On a dynamic website you can have more than just plain old articles. You can add picture galleries, forms, product catalogues, site maps, and much, much more. It’s important to identify those special pages from the beginning, but you’ll add them later using Joomla!’s components and extensions. That’s why we’ll first concentrate on building a rock-solid foundation; later we’ll add all of the desired extras.

Let’s start with step one now, and get our site organized!

Creating content containers: Sections and categories

To create a section, navigate to Content | Section Manager | New.

To make a new category, you’ll use the Category Manager instead. Just add a title for your new section or category and click on Save. You’ve created a perfectly workable section or category with the default settings (or parameters as Joomla! likes to call them).

Time for action – create a new section and a category

Your client was happy with the initial site structure you designed, but now their website is evolving, there’s a need for more content containers. Let’s add a news section first:

1. Navigate to Content | Section Manager and click on New.
2. In the Section: [New] screen, fill out the Title field. In this example, type News:

   

3. Leave the other values unchanged; click on Save. You’re taken to the Section Manager. The News section is now shown in the section list.

   

   Now, add a category to the new section. We’ll call this category General News:

4. Navigate to Content | Category Manager and click on New.
5. In the Title field, type General News.
6. In the Section field, select News.
7. Click on Save. You’re done!