Chapter 4 [ 107 ] Wrapping up: Change site settings The one-hour website is nished. However, there are a few adjustments to be made in the backend. Time for action – change site conguration The site conguraon sll shows some default values that don't match the new site contents. Let's enter the appropriate site name and add site metadata. 1. Navigate to Site | Global Conguraon. 2. In the Site Sengs secon, enter the Site Name: SRUP - Ugly Painngs Society. This is the site informaon that will be shown on in the Title Bar of the visitors web browser: 3. In the Metadata secon, change the text of Metadata Sengs. Metadata are im- portant for search engines—but if you leave the default text unchanged, search engines will nd informaon on Joomla! instead of informaon on SRUP. In the Global Site Meta Descripon, enter: SRUP is an internaonal Society For the Reappreciaon of Ugly Painngs. 4. In the Global Site Meta Keywords, enter a few keywords that characterize the site's contents: ugly painngs, bad painng, bad art, SRUP. What just happened? By entering a few lines in the Global Conguraon screen we've made sure the right site name shows up in the visitors' web browser and search engines pick up the right informaon about the site's contents. Pop quiz – test your basic Joomla! knowledge 1. What can you use the built-in Joomla! CSS editor for? a) To add some content containers b) To change the appearance of your site c) To change menu sengs Download at Wow! eBook WWW.WOWEBOOK.COM Web Building Basics: Creang a Site in an Hour [ 108 ] 2. In what order do you add arcles and menu links? a) Create menu links rst, then add arcles b) Add arcles rst, then create menu links c) You can choose whatever order you like 3. What do you use components and extensions for? a) Adding extras, such as newsleers or contact forms b) Adding content that only registered users can see c) To quickly add new content Summary You may not be aware of it, but you did actually do an incredible job. Your rst Joomla! website is up and running! You've seen that building your site is a three-step process. First you customize the layout, then you add content, and then you add further funconality (such as a contact form or a poll) to your site. You can personalize the looks of the site by eding the template les. If you know just a lile CSS, you can edit the template les directly in the Template Manager editor screen. Before you create content pages you create the containers they belong in. These containers are called secons (the top level) and categories (the second level). Create uncategorized arcles if you need some content pages that don't t any category. To make any content visible on your site there has to be a menu link poinng to it. You add items to the home page by changing their Front Page seng. In the Front Page Manager you can change the order in which these items are presented on the home page. You can add extra funconality through components and extensions. An example of this is the Contacts component that allows you to add contact details and contact forms. In this chapter, we followed the fast and simple approach and used only the basic capabilies of the system, leaving most sengs at their default values. Building on this, it is possible to create much bigger, complex, sophiscated, and cool sites. The next chapters will cover the subjects we've touched upon in more detail. In Chapter 5, we'll look specically at the site's structure; how can you organize the content of your site, whether it's a ten page personal website or a big corporate site? The challenge is to make your site's organizaon user friendly, expandable, and keep it easily manageable. Download at Wow! eBook WWW.WOWEBOOK.COM 5 Small Sites, Big Sites: Organizing your Content Effectively In the last chapter, you saw that creang a website in Joomla! revolves around three major tasks: designing a layout, creang content, and adding extras. The central part is, of course, creang content. You can have a Joomla! site using a simple default template, you can have a site without adding extra funconality, but you can't have a site without content. That's why, in the next few chapters, we'll concentrate on managing and creang content. In later chapters, you'll work on the layout and add extras. In this chapter you'll: Understand how to translate a basic site map to a workable blueprint for a Joomla!-based site Design a clear, scalable framework for your content, grouping your content with secons and categories Use uncategorized pages to build sites that don't require a mul-level content Building on the example site The SRUP site you developed in Chapter 4 is a great lile site, perfectly suited for your client's inial purposes to their rst Web presence. Now it's me to make room for growth. Your client has a big pile of informaon on ugly art that they want to present to the public. You are asked to design a site framework that makes it easy to add more content, while at the same me keeps it easy for visitors to quickly nd their way through the site. Download at Wow! eBook WWW.WOWEBOOK.COM Small Sites, Big Sites: Organizing your Content Eecvely [ 110 ] Can you do that? You most certainly can! Joomla! allows you to build sites of all sorts and sizes, whether they consist of just a few pages or thousands of them. If you plan ahead and start with a sound basic structure, you'll be rewarded with a site that's easy to maintain and extend. In this chapter, we'll review the site you've just built and look at the dierent ways the content can be structured—and rearranged, if need be. Grouping content: A crash course in site organization To lay the groundwork for your site, you won't use Joomla!. The back of a napkin will do ne. Draw up a site map to lay out the primary content chunks and their relaonships. View your site from a user's perspecve. What do you think your visitors will primarily look for, and how can you help them nd things fast and easily? Designing a site map To create a site map, rst collect all informaon you plan on having on your website and organize it into a simple and logical format. Let's have a look again at the SRUP website you built in the last chapter. The following is the basic outline of the site you've created up to now: Home Introducing Ugly Paintings Activities Mission Contact Us Lectures Meetings articles articles As site maps come, this is a very basic one. For the most part, it's just one level deep. Introducing Ugly Painngs and Mission are basic web pages (arcles). Acvies is a secon that allows the visitor to browse two other categories. Contact Us is a contact form page. This structure was good enough for a basic website, but it won't do if SRUP wants to expand their site. Download at Wow! eBook WWW.WOWEBOOK.COM Chapter 5 [ 111 ] Time for action – create a future proof site map Let's make some room for growth. Imagine your client's planning to add an indenite amount of new content, so there's a need for addional content containers. They have come up with the following list of subjects they want to add to their site: News items A few pages to introduce the founding members of SRUP Reviews on ugly art Facts on ugly painngs (history, lile known facts, and so on) What's the best way to organize things? Let's gure out which content ts which type of container. Step 1: You'll probably want to create a separate News secon. News should be a top level item, a part of the site's main menu. Home Intr. Ugly Paintings Activities Mission Contact Us Lectures Meetings articles articles articles News General News Step 2: The informaon on the SRUP founders ts in a new secon About SRUP. Home Intr.Ugly Paintings Activities Mission Lectures Meetings articlesarticles articlesarticles News About SRUP General News Who are SRUP? Contact Us Download at Wow! eBook WWW.WOWEBOOK.COM Small Sites, Big Sites: Organizing your Content Eecvely [ 112 ] Step 3: Both Reviews and Facts can be categories in a new general secon on Ugly Painngs. The exisng arcle Introducing Ugly Painngs could be moved here (or dropped). Home News General News articles Ugly Paintings Reviews Facts Activities Meetings About SRUP Who are SRUP? Mission Contact Us articles articles articles articles articles Lectures What just happened? You've laid a solid foundaon for your site—on paper. Before you actually start using Joomla! to create secons and categories, create a structure for the content that you have in mind. Basically, no maer how big or small your website is, you'll organize it just like the example you've just seen. You'll work from top to boom, from the primary level to the lower levels, dening content groups and their relaons. Bear in mind, though, that there will certainly be more than one way to organize your informaon. Choose an organizaon that makes sense to you and your visitors, and try to keep things lean and clean. A complex structure will make it harder to maintain the content, and eventually—when building menus—it will make it harder to design clear and simple navigaon paths for your visitors. Tips on choosing secons It can be useful to choose secons based on the main intenons people have when they come to the site. What are they here for? Is it to Browse Products or to Join a Workshop? Common choices for secons are: Products, Catalog, Company, Porolio, About Us, Jobs, News, and Downloads. Try not to have more than ve to seven secons. Once you have more than that, readers won't be able to hold them all in their heads at once when they have to choose which one to browse. Download at Wow! eBook WWW.WOWEBOOK.COM Chapter 5 [ 113 ] Transferring your site map to Joomla! Let's have a closer look at our new site map and idenfy the Joomla! elements. This—and any—Joomla! site is likely to consist of ve types of content. Home News General News articles Ugly Paintings Reviews Facts Activities Meetings About SRUP Who are SRUP? Mission Contact Us articles articles articles articles articles Lectures The following are the content types in our SRUP site map: Home Obviously, the top level item will be the home page. News The main content groups we can idenfy as secons and categories. This small site has four secons, three of which contain two categories. articles Each of the categories hold actual content; this is what will end up in Joomla! as arcles. Mission In this site map, there is one arcle that doesn't really belong in any category: the Mission Statement page. Every site will have one or two of those independent arcles. In Joomla!, you can add these as uncategorized arcles. You've seen some examples of this type of arcles when building your rst site in the last chapter. Contact Finally, there's one item that represents a very dierent type of content. In the site map above, a grey background indicates an item containing special funconality. In this case this is a contact form. Other examples are guest books, order forms, and photo galleries. Basically, that's all there is to a Joomla! site. When you've got your site outlined like this, you won't meet any surprises while building it. You can transform any amount of content and funconality into a website, step by step. Download at Wow! eBook WWW.WOWEBOOK.COM Small Sites, Big Sites: Organizing your Content Eecvely [ 114 ] How do you turn a site map into a website? If you've got your site blueprint laid out, you probably want to start building! Now, what should be the rst step? What's the best, and fastest, way to get from that site map on the back of your napkin to a real-life Joomla! site? In this book, we'll work in this order: 1. Organize: Create content containers. You've seen that much of the site map we just created consists of content containers: secons and categories. In this chapter, we'll focus on these containers. We'll create all necessary containers for our example site. 2. Add content: Fill the containers with arcles. Next, we'll add arcles to the secons and categories. Arcles are the "classic content" that most web pages are made of. We should also check for arcles that do not belong in any category. Instead of assigning them to a secon and a category, we'll add them as Uncategorized content. For our example site, we'll work on arcle contents in the next chapter. 3. Put your contents on display: Create the home page and content overview pages. Next, you'll want to guide and invite visitors. You can achieve this using two special types of pages in the site map, the home page and Joomla!'s secon/category overview pages ("secondary home pages"). You'll focus on deploying these page types in Chapter 7. 4. Make everything ndable: Create menus. The top level items in your site map will probably end up as menu items on the site. To open up your site to the world you'll create and customize menus helping visitors to easily navigate your content. This is the subject of Chapter 8. And what about the special content stu? You'll noce that in the above list we've summed up all sorts of "classic content", such as arcles, home pages, overview pages, and menus linking it all. We haven't yet menoned one essenal part of the site map, the special goodies. On a dynamic website you can have more than just plain old arcles. You can add picture galleries, forms, product catalogues, site maps, and much, much more. It's important to idenfy those special pages from the beginning, but you'll add them later using Joomla!'s components and extensions. That's why we'll rst concentrate on building a rock-solid foundaon; later we'll add all of the desired extras. Let's start with step one now, and get our site organized! Download at Wow! eBook WWW.WOWEBOOK.COM Chapter 5 [ 115 ] Creating content containers: Sections and categories In the previous chapter you have already had a foretaste of how easy it is to create secons and categories. To create a secon, navigate to Content | Secon Manager | New. To make a new category, you'll use the Category Manager instead. Just add a tle for your new secon or category and click on Save. You've created a perfectly workable secon or category with the default sengs (or parameters as Joomla! likes to call them). Time for action – create a new section and a category Your client was happy with the inial site structure you designed, but now their website is evolving, there's a need for more content containers. Let's add a news secon rst: 1. Navigate to Content | Secon Manager and click on New. 2. In the Secon: [New] screen, ll out the Title eld. In this example, type News: 3. Leave the other values unchanged; click on Save. You're taken to the Secon Manager. The News secon is now shown in the secon list. Download at Wow! eBook WWW.WOWEBOOK.COM Small Sites, Big Sites: Organizing your Content Eecvely [ 116 ] Now, add a category to the new secon. We'll call this category General News: 4. Navigate to Content | Category Manager and click on New. 5. In the Title eld, type General News. 6. In the Secon eld, select News. 7. Click on Save. You're done! What just happened? You have added a News secon with one category: General News. Remember, a secon needs at least one category. For now, this General News category will do. Should the client wish to have more specic news categories later, these can easily be added. It's quite OK to have secons with single categories. In the backend they serve as a funconal (and mandatory) container for content, in the frontend the user won't have to click his way through redundant links. On clicking the News link, he'll be shown all of the news content in one go. Basically this means it's possible to add content to a Joomla! secon without having to create several categories when they're not really needed. Have a go hero – add some articles The News category you just added is sll empty. Add some dummy content to it by repeang the steps you took in the last chapter (see Chapter 4). In short, navigate to Content | Arcle Manager and click on New. Add a Title, and in the Secon drop-down box select News. In the Category drop-down box, General News will be selected (it's the only opon). Add some dummy content. Add a Read More link aer the rst paragraph to enable Joomla! to separately show the introductory text and the body text. Click on Save and you're done. In this example, we've added three news arcles to our new secon: Download at Wow! eBook WWW.WOWEBOOK.COM . choose which one to browse. Download at Wow! eBook WWW.WOWEBOOK.COM Chapter 5 [ 113 ] Transferring your site map to Joomla! Let's have a closer look at our new site map and idenfy the Joomla! . a website in Joomla! revolves around three major tasks: designing a layout, creang content, and adding extras. The central part is, of course, creang content. You can have a Joomla! site. eBook WWW.WOWEBOOK.COM Small Sites, Big Sites: Organizing your Content Eecvely [ 110 ] Can you do that? You most certainly can! Joomla! allows you to build sites of all sorts and sizes, whether they consist