I've summarised the main points of my how the system works in this diagramme. (That's diagram for those of you in The Colonies).
The important stuff (i.e. what you want to tell your website visitors) is almost all within Articles. You set those up with Article Manager.
How you show your articles to your visitors depends upon the three things at the top: The Front Page, the Menus and other Modules.
1: Front Page
By default (I've changed mine since) the Front Page is set up to have "Front Page Blog" format. This means it will show all the articles that you have ticked as being "front page" articles. When you write an article (in Article Manager), there is a Yes/No control in which you can choose whether it is aFront Page article. If you choose Yes, that article will appear on the front page. If you put the "read more" splitter in the article, it will just show the top part, and add a link to a page showing the full text of the article.
The articles have to be in the database in the first place, but it's the Front Page manager that chooses that the front page consists of a "blog layout" list of all the articles you have ticked as being front page articles.
I have changed my front page to be a single article - Guru Simon recommended it for my kind of site. if I were running a blog-style site, or a news-based campaigning site like Friend Jo then of course I'd leave it exactly as it is. In my case, I've writted a single article that contains all the content (and all the links) I want in a single article.
The beauty of the Front Page Blog is that it automatically includes any articles that you write and tick that "front page" option for, and automatically creates the page with the full article for any visitor that clicks on it.
2: The Menus
Here is the main skeleton of your website. Creating a menu entry creates a page that will appear when a visitor clicks on the menu entry.
The menu entry can link:
- directly to a single article (look at my About Us page)
- to a blog-style page of all the articles in a section or a category (look at my teambuilding page)
- and all other kinds of pages, inlcuding a list of, or one individual's contact details (see my Contact page)
- tick your article to be on the front page
- create a menu item that points directly to your article
- include your article in a category or section and create a menu item that is the Blog Layout of that category or section
Not all content goes in the middle. it's the obvious place for articles, but you'll see my website has quotations from customer testimonials on each page in the right margin. I used the Banners module to put them there. This, the News articles (I've used this to put the blurb in the header of each page), the login, the Latest Articles, are all controlled from within the "Extensions" menu. Those that include data, such as the Banners and the Contacts) have entries in the Components menu to create the data, but you determine where they appear on the page, and which pages they appear on (all, none, or choose from a list) through the Extensions menus.
Summary
- Your articles are not directly accessible to the visitor.
- Visitors only see what they can access through front page, menus or certain other modules.
- Create articles, bung them in sections and categories
- Set up menus that point to the sections or categories
- You have a website!
- Then you can play with other features like polls and contacts.
I'm quite a visual thinker so diagrammes and charts are a natural part of my thinking. I haven't yet seen many conceptual diagrammes of this kind in the Joomla! documentation that's available; most "how to learn Joomla!" documents seem to focus on frog-marching you through setting up your sections and categories and leaving you dizzy but not necessarily understanding this big picture. If this article has helped at all, please let me know - you can comment here or email me through the website.
'Til next time
Dave
My site is here.
Joomla! is based here.
