Joomla User Manual

Introduction¶

What are articles and categories? What are they used for in Joomla! sites?

Articles¶

In Joomla!, an Article is a self-contained unit of written information to be displayed on a web site. It normally contains some text and can contain pictures and other types of content. For many Joomla! sites, articles form the majority of the information presented.

It is important to understand that the content of the site is totally separate from the formatting of the site, the way it looks on the page. So it is best to think of Articles as pure content independent of presentation. The same Article might be shown with different fonts, colours, headings, and background, and might be shown in different locations on the page, all depending on other settings in the Joomla! CMS.

Categories¶

Categories in Joomla! provide an optional method for organizing articles. A Category may contain articles and other Categories rather like a file system tree. If a category is in another category it is called a subcategory of that category. An Article can only be in one Category in the category tree.

For example, you might have a Category called Pets and in that category a subcategory called Dogs and another called Cats. Articles about dogs would be assigned to the Dogs Category and ones about cats to the Cats Category. You cannot have one Article that is in both the Cats and Dogs categories. If you have an article that is about both cats and dogs you would put it in the Pets category.

There are two good reasons to organize Articles in categories:

• To take advantage of standard layouts.
• To find selected articles in what might become a long list of articles.

Blog and List Layouts¶

A layout is a method of organising content in a page controlled by a menu item. There are many different menu item types. For example, there is Single Article type that displays a single article. That works well when a site has just a few articles but becomes impractical, except for a few important articles, when a site has hundreds or thousands of articles.

Joomla has Category Blog and Category List menu item types that show articles from selected categories in well-designed layouts. As new articles are created and assigned to categories they are automatically placed according to the parameters set for each menu-controlled layout page.

For example, say you have a Category Blog layout for the Pets Category, and say you have it set to order articles starting with the most recent one first. When you add a new Article to the Pets Category, it will automatically show in the Pets blog page as the first Article. You don't have to do anything other than add the Article and assign it to the Pets Category.

A Category Blog layout often displays one article taster prominently at the top of a page and several more article tasters in rows and columns below. This type of layout is often used for a site Home page. The articles may be selected from a single category, for example News.

A Category List layout is designed to display lists of articles, often with a search filter to help find articles of interest. For example, if you have 200 articles in your site, you can filter articles by Category so the list will be limited to those in the selected Category.

Categories versus Menus¶

Menus also have a tree structure with some items being parents to others. It is important to understand that the structure of a Category tree (for example Organisms → Animals → Pets → Dogs) is unrelated to the structure of a menu tree even if the menu has the same structure and the items have the same names.

Other Types of Categories¶

Categories are also used by other components, including Banners, Contacts, and News Feeds. These categories are completely separate from Article categories and are set up in different Joomla! Administrator pages. So when you see something about categories, it might refer to Article categories or it might refer to categories for these other components.