Now that we are ready to put categories into the Web site, I am going to walk you
through that whole process now.
So I'm here on the Control Panel in the back-end of Joomla!
and the first place I am going to go is the Category Manager and you can get to
the Category Manager by clicking on the link over here on the right in the Quick
Icons for the Category Manager or you can go to Content>Category Manager.
So I am going to go ahead and go here to the Category Manager and you'll see
here by default we have a category called Uncategorized.
There are no other categories at the moment because we haven't created any.
So what we need to do is we need to understand what our site map is so we know
what kind of categories that we want to create here inside of the Category
Manager for our Web site.
So inside your Exercise Files I have given you the sitemap for what we are going to build.
So we are going to start with the homepage and the homepage is going to use that
Uncategorized category, so we have got the homepage covered already.
I'll need to make a category called Products for the Products page then
I am going to make a couple of categories that are actually willing to be nested
inside of each other, I am going to have an overall news category along with
some subcategories for Solar and Press Releases.
Then I am going to have some pages, actually three pages that are all just about
information, so about the Company Structure and Executives are all going to be
located inside of the About category.
And then the Links and the Contact Us are going to be driven by components
so we are not going to need Categories for those at all.
So why are all these pages in About, all going under one category, but I have in
the News and Information areas, these broken into separate?
Well, the reason why is this; under the About part of this Web site, these are
just pages that are going to talk about the company in general and the company
structure and the company executives, they are just pages of text,
there is nothing really interactive that's going on.
So I'm just going to create those as single articles and hook them up to my Web site.
But for my Solar Blog, where I am going to be blogging about information about
cool new solar technologies and my Press Release category, I am going to have a
number of articles that are going to fall in these areas and once more I am
going to want to display these so that I have little bits of introductory
information followed by a Read more link and probably several of them on a page.
To accomplish that in Joomla!, I am going to need to put them all in the same category.
So that's why I've chosen to assign separate categories to under News and Information.
And for the Products category, we'll actually have several individual products
as well and we can display those together on a page.
So that's why they've got their own category.
In general what you are going to start by doing is when you have a sitemap like
this, you can start by assigning a category to each particular area and then you
can combine these, it doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense to make a separate
category for each individual page.
So it didn't make sense to have an About category, a Company Structure category
and Executives category.
So I lumped all those together under About, but it did make sense to have
separate categories under the News and Information part of the site, because
those are going to be large and there is going to be many articles involved
in each one of those areas. So that's always a good place to start.
Once you throw in Access Control Lists or ACL on top of all of this, you
may need to adjust your Category Structure again, but that's a fairly advanced topic.
So my advice would be start with your sitemap, think about assigning categories
to certainly the major pieces of navigation, assign categories to sub-navigation
if it seems required if you're going to be doing something kind of bloggish or
if you are going to have a whole lot of pages in the subcategories, otherwise
lump your sub-navigation under your main navigation, if it's going to be a
simpler structure as it is under About and that will get you started at least in
Joomla!, you may wind up tweaking things later, but that's easy enough to do.
So don't worry about getting it absolutely perfect when you start building,
you can always go back and change things very easily.
So now what I need to do is I need to create a Products category, a News and
Info category, a Solar category, a Press Releases and an About category.
So five categories that I need to create. Let me show you how to do that.
So I am going to start here inside of my Category Manager.
In the upper-left hand corner is a big green button that says New and that's
what I want to do, I want to make a new category.
So I am going to go ahead and click that button and it's going to ask me
for lots of pieces of information.
So the only thing that really matters here is the title of the category.
So the first category I am going to create is Products.
So all I need to do is type that name here into the title.
Those of you who have worked with Joomla!
For some time, you may be amazed at how simplified the screen has become,
that's because a lot of the options that you use to see on the right side of
the screen have now been hidden, so these are behind tabs where you have
options here for alternative layouts, you can change Metadata Descriptions and
Meta Keywords associated with this and you have a screen for sitting at ACL as
well associated with this category.
But for right now, none of those things are really going to matter for us.
All we are interested in is working on the title for this category.
So that's all I need to set up at the moment.
If I hit the Save & New button here, I will save the Products category and open
up a new screen, which will have nothing in it.
So I can create my next category which is News and Info.
I can hit Save & New again and create my next category which will be called
Solar, Save & New again and I have Press Releases and finally Save & New
one last time and I am going to set up About.
About is my last category of the five that I needed to create, so this time
I'm going to hit Save & Close and by hitting Save & Close, you can see that
I have set up my categories here for the Web site.
So at this point what I've done is I've just created five categories, they are
all at the same level of hierarchy, but what I really wanted to do was the Solar
category and the Press Releases category.
I wanted to set them up as children of the News and Information category or subcategories.
So let's go back in and edit those, editing a category is very simple,
all you have to do is click on the name of the category and you can make whatever
changes are required and if you scroll on down the page a little bit more you
will see some information down at the bottom here for details.
And what I am going to do is I am going to change this Parent dropdown here from
No parent to the News and Information category.
And I am going to hit Save & Close.
And you will see here in the Category Manager that Solar is now located as a
sub-category under News and Info.
Likewise when I click on Press Releases here and I scroll in down to the bottom,
under Parent, I am going to change the parent to News and Info again.
Not Solar, if I have made Solar the parent then News and Information would be
the main parent and then I'd have to go to Solar and then I'd have to go to
Press Releases, which is not what I want to do.
I want Solar and Press Releases to be at the same level, so News and Info will
be the parent in both cases.
And I am going to scroll back up to the top and say Save & Close.
So there we go, now I have got my two subcategories set up.
Joomla! allows you create as many subcategories as you like, but this is really all we
need for this Web site, it's not an enormous Web site, it's got a fairly simple
structure to it, so we have gone ahead and set up all of the categories for the
Web site, we are doing great.