| Content is King A Beginner's Guide to organizing content in Joomla |
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| Written by Barrie North | ||||||||
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This guide is an in-depth tutorial to the information a Joomla site displays. It details how to plan and organize the information and user experience for the site. It also explains the hierarchy structure currently used in Joomla, sections and categories and how information can be content items, components or modules.
In This Guide
Planning Your ContentSections and Categories, Static items, Blogs and TablesOne of the hardest parts of Joomla for those new to it to figure out is how content is organized. The relationship between sections, categories, blogs and tables can be very confusing. To get a better idea of how a Joomla site can be organized, let’s make a sitemap for an imaginary site. This is a standard planning tool used by web designers and is critical for a Joomla web site. It’s usually shown as a tree diagram showing all the pages in the site. Here is our example.
In this sitemap, each web page is represented by a box, the lines are links within the site. A sitemap represents viewer path through a site rather than content organization. It is still a useful planning tool for organizing the site however. Here there are seven pages, from an organizational point of view, it seems like there are four main areas of the site:
The first step in trying to understand how Joomla structures its content is to realize there are no pages! OK, so what does that mean? I talked about the idea of “placeholders” for the content in a CMS like Joomla. Remember, the content is stored in the database and needs to be placed onto the pages by Joomla. The CMS has spaces on its pages to place content and needs to know what content it should put there. Joomla only know what content should be used once you click on a link. Once the viewer has done this, Joomla now knows what page to generate, gets the content, and puts it into place. Consider a very 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 it and you see the content. This seems a daft example but it illustrates very well how pages are generated in a CMS. On a Joomla site, you click on a link (the magazine index) and then the content is generated and arranged on the page. So in the magazine case the pages exist before you go to it, but on a Joomla web site, the page only exists once you visit it. Strange but true. The Least You Need to Know There are 4 main ways that Joomla generates content:
Note that these are not separate pages, in some cases it’s possible to have more than one type on the same page.
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