Joomla Section Explained
Joomla!TM sections allow you as the administrator to easily organize the content of your website. If you are familiar with creating categories in Joomla, then you are already familiar with the process for creating a section. The following will result in creating a publicly accessible section for your website.
Navigate to your administrator, and in the "content" column click the section manager link from the drop down list.
- Click New
- Type Templates into the Title
- Ensure it's published
- For this example we are going to leave the access level as public and the following fields at their default
- Click Save
As a rule of thumb, remember Sections go to Categories like hot dog buns go to hot dogs. The category goes inside of the section, and typically you'll have more hot dogs than buns.
Your new section is now saved and ready to go. Now that your new section has been created, what all can you do with it? How is it beneficial to your content organization efforts?
Joomla sections are at the top of the content organization food chain. Setting up the sections first allows for easy organization of your articles. A technique we use when writing content is to first filter the article manager by section then click "new" to create a new article. When managing a large content base this is definitely a time saver. Joomla will automatically display the section that you selected new from, simply choose the category, layout and write your content and click save.
It's best to plan out your content before setting up your content sections. As an example, if you're building a site related to hot dogs, one of your sections may be chili dogs, and another being mustard dogs. To go a bit deeper, a category inside your chili dogs section could be Bob's chili dogs, and an article inside that category could be 2for1 chili dog sale available until Monday.
Joomla Section Layout
To display articles inside the section's category's on the front end in blog format, use the section blog menu type. Customizing this menu item is the same as if using the front page component for your home page link. Under your basic parameters the leading refers to the amount of categories that will display in the full width of the content area. Understanding this Intros and Columns are self explanatory. Links are a bit cryptic, though. The links are the text links that will display once the amount of intro items for the page have been exceeded.
In the advanced parameters we use this technique to allow us full control over the order in which content is displayed. For the category order choose the last option "order" we also choose the same for the primary order. This allows us to order the articles in the category manager for that section in any way we choose and have it display that way to our end users. Component parameters are used to override globals.
The other option for displaying Joomla section categories is to choose the section layout. This approach lays out your categories in table format as text links. This usually is best served as an internal layout preference.
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