I just showed you how to create some new categories in Joomla!
and I showed you how to edit them, but I didn't show you how to delete them yet.
So let's hop back into our Category Manager which you can get to over here from
the Control Panel under Quick Icons, if you're not already in there and let's go
ahead and create a new category here just to show you how to delete them.
So I am going to create a category called Delete Me and say Save & Close.
So there is my category here and to get rid of this category what I am going to
need to do put a checkmark by this and I click on the trashcan icon up top that
will send it to the Trash.
But just like your Macintosh or your windows environment, all you have done so
far is actually put that particular category in the Trash.
So the category still exists and that can potentially cause trouble especially
if you decide later to go create another category called Delete Me, you might
get an error about an alias for that already existing.
If you really truly want your category to be deleted entirely that it doesn't
exist in your Joomla! site
anymore anywhere else, here's the second step you're going to have to do.
So over here on the side, on the left side of the screen you will see that we
have a number of filters that are available, one of which is Select Status.
This is a way you can filter categories or articles by whether they're Published
or Unpublished, Archived, Trashed and so forth.
If I switch this to Trashed, this will show me the fact that I still have this
category called Delete Me.
It's just sitting here in the Trash.
I could in fact restore this, if I click the Trash icon here, roll my mouse over,
you will see that it says Publish Item, what this will do is toggle this
to the Published state and you see here now I am looking at my Trashed Items
and I don't see anything anymore, that's because there aren't any more trashed items.
Over here under the Filters, see, so I need to switch this back to my Published
items and there is that Delete Me category one more time. Alright.
So now if I really want to get rid of this, I put a checkmark by it and send it
to the Trash, so we know that it's now under the Trashed state, so now if I go
to the Trashed state, there is the Delete Me category one more time.
Now if I really, truly want to get rid of it altogether, what I am going to do is
put a checkmark by this and then say Empty Trash.
Now that item is gone, you see there is nothing left in the Trash and if
I switch back to my Published categories, you will see truly that category has now
gone, it no longer exists anywhere.
So what's the best thing to do, to trash items or something else?
My sense is it might be better just to unpublish things.
If you need to get rid of something totally, if totally screwed up, it's
totaling wrong, it totally fine to send things to the trash, but if your boss comes to
you and says I don't want that thing displaying on the Web site anymore, rather
than trashing it, because you know how bosses are, they may come back to you and
change their mind later, you can always unpublish something.
So if you want to unpublish something, all you need to do is, on the little green
icon here where it says Status, you see if I roll my mouse over it, I get a
tooltip that says Unpublished Item.
If I unpublish this item, it actually disappears from my list of categories
again because I'm showing only Published categories, but if I switch to my
Unpublished categories, I still have a category called About, it's simply not
available to show on the front end of the Web site.
I can still get to it here from the back end of the Web site;
it's very easy to re-establish it as available, simply by clicking on the icon
again and publishing it.
So here, if you have your filter here set to just Select Status, not to
Published or Unpublished, this will show you both Published and Unpublished
items all together in the same list or you can filter by Published and
Unpublished items the same way I have just showed you with those filters.
However, I do want the About category to be available to me because I'm about to
go create some content for the About category.
So I am going to go ahead and check that off and make this Published.
The other way that you can publish and unpublish items is to put a checkmark
next to things and use these buttons up here on the top for publishing and
unpublishing or if you happen to be editing a particular item, you can also set
the status down here in the dropdown so Published, Unpublished, Archived or
Trashed, that's also available to you.
So remember that trashing something is actually a two-step process;
you have to send it to the Trash and then you have the empty the trash to get
rid of an item entirely and publishing in unpublishing are really probably the
way you want to work with most of your content inside of Joomla!, it means that
you have still got a copy of things available, if you ever need to republish it
to the Web site, you can just click a button and restore it to its previous state
whereas trashing of course, it's a far more permanent kind of thing and it's
hard to get content back, like impossible, if you do get rid of something from
your Web site and then it turns out you need it later.