Organising Content in Joomla

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I’ve installed Joomla on a domain as I wanted to try out a content management system. I’d never used Mambo or Drupal, so didn’t really know what to expect. It has to be said, I’m pretty impressed. For a start it allows you to fairly easily manage content (although in a limited hierarchy… More of this later). Also, there are tonnes of free plug-ins and themes available for the system.

Organising Content

The first thing I wanted to look at was how best to organise content. Using the administration tool I found that Joomla has a two level hierarchy. These are known as sections and categories. Content is created within a category. It really is as flat as that…

As an example hierarchy, imagine I wanted to write content based on shapes. My structure may be:

Shape (This is a section)

2D (This is a Category)

Square (Content)
Triangle (Content)
Circle (Content)

3D (This is a Category)

Cube (Content)
Cuboid (Content)
etc etc

Menu’s

Although the content hierarchy in Joomla is quite flat, luckily the menu structure is really quite flexible. You can link menu items to sections, categories, content and many other things. So, my menu could look like this:

My Favourite shapes

Circle
Cube

For more information on Joomla I’d suggest you visit http://forum.joomla.org.

notsorich @ March 23, 2006