Time for action—create a section and some categories
Your client wants to publish a range of articles on the club activities on their new site; that's what they're all about. Specifically, they want articles on lectures and meetings.
How can we categorize these articles the Joomla! way? Let's create an Activities section and add two categories in that section: Lectures and Meetings.
- Navigate to Content | Section Manager. Click on the New button.
- In the Title field, type Activities. Don't worry about the other fields; you can leave them empty for now. Click on Save. You have created a section.
- Navigate to Content | Category Manager. Click on the New button.
- In the Title field, type Lectures. As there is only one section, the category is automatically added to this section. Click on Save. You've created a category in the Activities section.
- Adding more categories is done in a similar way. In the Category Manager, click on New again to add a Meetings category. Click on Save.
The Category Manager shows the results (two new categories), all in one section:
What just happened?
In Joomla!, you create content groups before you can actually start adding articles and menu links. Sections are the main, high-level way to organize your site; categories are the second level. When you add sections and categories in the backend you'll notice nothing changes on the frontend. Sections and categories aren't automatically shown on the site. To get them to display we'll create a menu link pointing to this section and category content later.
By defining a section and some categories you've now got a foundation to add any amount of content on these two main subjects. In later chapters, we'll expand this structure.
Add articles to the categories
Now we come to the core of content management and actually start creating content! We'll make some articles, apply the appropriate formatting, and add images.