Content Management 101 — Sections, Categories & Articles

Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tems (CMS) do exactly what the name implies — help you to man­age con­tent.  To do this, there must be a con­cept, or a log­i­cal struc­ture that pro­vides a con­sis­tent and sim­ple way to keep all of your site’s infor­ma­tion organ­ised.  My favourite CMS is Joomla. With Joomla, the con­cept used for organ­is­ing infor­ma­tion is based on 3 things:  Sec­tions, Cat­e­gories and Arti­cles.  If you’ve already come across those terms and are a lit­tle per­plexed as to what they mean, read on.

In this post my objec­tive is to help you get a clear pic­ture of what Sec­tions, Cat­e­gories and Arti­cles are, how they relate to each other and how you can use them to cre­ate a clean, well organ­ised site that you can main­tain your­self with min­i­mal effort.

I love Joomla because it’s free Open Source soft­ware (read this to find out what that means, and under­stand the dif­fer­ence between free, as in speech, and free, as in beer), has thou­sands of tem­plates, plu­g­ins and exten­sions to do any­thing you can imag­ine, from photo gal­leries, video stream­ing, blog­ging, dis­cus­sion forums, online shops…you name it!

The best part is that tools like Joomla are today so advanced that even if you’ve never built a web­site before, you can quickly get up and run­ning with a lit­tle dili­gent research, exper­i­men­ta­tion and guid­ance. Hope­fully this arti­cle can help you to under­stand the basic con­cepts behind a CMS like Joomla, and why it will make man­ag­ing your web site easier.

One of the first things new Joomla users come up against (once they’ve man­aged to install Joomla — which is ridicu­lously easy!) is under­stand­ing how to struc­ture their con­tent.  What’s a Sec­tion, Cat­e­gory, or Arti­cle?  These con­cepts were cre­ated to help you keep track of pages (believe me, once your site has been around for a while, man­ag­ing all that infor­ma­tion and keep­ing it up to date becomes a very big job!).  The Sec­tion, Cat­e­gory, Arti­cle con­cept also helps you ensure that your site is well organ­ised for your vis­i­tors, so that there is a log­i­cal, con­sis­tent struc­ture to your infor­ma­tion that makes things easy to find.

The most effec­tive way I’ve found to explain Sec­tions, Cat­e­gories and Arti­cles is to use a news­pa­per anal­ogy.  We’ve all read a news­pa­per before.  It’s made up of a num­ber of Sec­tions, and gen­er­ally speak­ing, you can always find the Sec­tion you’re inter­ested in, because it’s always in the same loca­tion within the newspaper.

Take the Sports sec­tion for exam­ple; every sports fan knows that in nearly every paper, the Sports sec­tion starts on the back page.  If you want to find out your team’s lat­est scores, the first thing you do when you pick up the paper is turn to the back page.  This isn’t an acci­dent — the news­pa­per pub­lisher is mak­ing it as easy as pos­si­ble for its read­ers to find exactly the con­tent they’re look­ing for as quickly and eas­ily as pos­si­ble.  As a bonus, when they’re get­ting the paper ready to print, there’s a ded­i­cated sec­tion for all the sports sto­ries — no one in the print room has to scratch their head and won­der where such-and-such a story should go — if it’s about sport, it goes in the Sports section.

Joomla Sec­tions are exactly the same.  Think about the dif­fer­ent types of infor­ma­tion your site’s vis­tors are inter­ested in, and that’s what your Sec­tions should be.  A news­pa­per might have a Sports sec­tion, a Busi­ness sec­tion, a Lifestyle sec­tion, an Edi­to­r­ial sec­tion and so on.  Work out what your vis­i­tors want, and those (gen­er­ally) 5 or 6 things will become your Sec­tions, and the pri­mary struc­ture of your site.

Let’s return to the news­pa­per anal­ogy to explain Cat­e­gories.  If you’re a sports fan, you’ll gen­er­ally be inter­ested in 1 or 2 par­tic­u­lar sports.  Most likely, if you’re a fol­lower of say, foot­ball, when you open the paper you’ll go straight to the back page to get to the Sports sec­tion, then flick 2 or 3 pages in to find the foot­ball Cat­e­gory.  Does that make sense?  A Cat­e­gory is just like a Sec­tion within a Sec­tion, and it gives you a way to break down a large amount of infor­ma­tion into man­age­able chunks, and make it easy for your vis­i­tors to quickly drill down to exactly the type of infor­ma­tion they’re look­ing for.

By now you’ve prob­a­bly got it — but for com­plete­ness I’ll per­sist and describe Arti­cles.  An Arti­cle in Joomla, just as in our news­pa­per, is the basic unit of con­tent we’ll need to man­age.  Within the foot­ball Cat­e­gory (within the Sports Sec­tion), you’ll prob­a­bly find a num­ber of Arti­cles.  Arti­cles might be writ­ten by a num­ber of dif­fer­ent authors, about very dif­fer­ent sub­jects — but we know that they’ll all be about Sport, and more specif­i­cally, about Foot­ball.  In Joomla an Arti­cle is what you use to pub­lish words, pic­tures videos and pretty much any­thing else that might appear on your site.

Every Arti­cle must belong to a Cat­e­gory.  Every Cat­e­gory must belong to a Sec­tion.  Start by cre­at­ing your Sec­tions on paper (it will save you a lot of time later), and then your Cat­e­gories.  Once you’re sat­is­fied that most of your con­tent now has a log­i­cal place to reside on your site, you can go ahead and start to write Arti­cles and add them to the appro­pri­ate Cat­e­gories and Sections.

Of course there are other things you can add to your site (like online shops and dis­cus­sion forums) but they are a sub­ject for another post.  For now, I hope you have a clearer under­stand­ing of how and why to use Joomla’s Sec­tions, Cat­e­gories and Articles.

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