Learn about Joomla's Sections and Categories

In this tutorial you will learn:

  1. About Joomla's sections and categories
  2. How to organize your site with sections and categories.
  3. How to use sections and categories for a user navigation friendly site and search engine optimization (planning for the future for an openSEF install)
  4. The video demonstrates how to add sections and categories in Joomla. The video uses the "News Site" example from the text section of this tutorial. This video requires Macromedia Flash with sound and is best viewed with a resolution of 1024x768 or higher (approx runtime: 5:28 minutes /Size 3.05MB)

This tutorial assumes you have Super Administrator Privileges. Before we get to the video tutorial lets see what sections and categories are all about. It may help to read over this once quickly, watch the video tutorial and then come back and read it again.

Sections: Sections can be thought of as broad topic areas that can encompass sub-topics or categories
Categories: Categories can be thought of as a narrow or specific topic

Each section must contain one or more categories to add content. Yeah. That doesn't help anyone. It is probably best to use some examples.

You can be as general or specific as you like. The more specific you get the more work it will take when adding articles (content) but the more user friendly and search engine friendly your site will be.

For a NEWS site you could:

Create a section called "News"

  • News

containing categories "local", "world", "entertainment" like this:

  • News
    • local
    • world
    • entertainment

Another way to approach the NEWS site is by creating sections called:

  • Local
  • World
  • Entertainment

This opens up the possibilities for a much larger richer site because we can have multiple categories for each section. For example:

  • Local
    • news
    • community outreach
    • classifieds
    • obituaries
  • World
    • National News
    • World News
    • Business
    • Science
  • Entertainment
    • Clubs
    • Dining
    • Style
    • Art

This adds complexity for the administrators and publishers of the site but can be made user friendly on the front end.

 

Lets look at one more example. In this example we will make a web site for AUTOMOBILES.

We will create the following sections and categories:

  • Luxury Cars
    • Bentley
    • BMW
    • Cadillac
    • Lexus
    • Lincoln
    • Mercedes
  • Sports Cars
    • Aston Martin
    • Ferrari
    • Lamborghini
    • Porsche
  • Trucks
    • Chevrolet
    • Dodge
    • Ford
    • Nissan
    • Toyota

This is of course just one way you could approach the AUTOMOBILES site.

Keep in mind that there are many ways to organize your site. You do not have to make things complicated for the sake of making them complicated. A good example would be a personal web site of a small business web site that wants to have a small brochure-like site. But if you do plan on having a large site taking some extra time now to organize can save you a lot of hassles latter.