This chapter from Joomla! 3 Explained: Your Step-by-Step Guide, 2nd Edition explains the easiest and fastest way to add content to a Joomla site. If you follow this workflow, it will make your Joomla life very easy.

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The workflow for adding Joomla content is simple:

Step 1. Categorize. Create organization for your articles.

Create organization for your articles. Step 2. Add. Write your articles.

Write your articles. Step 3. Show. Create menu links so that people can click through and see your articles.

I like to call this the CASh workflow. CASh is short for “Categorize, Add, Show.” It does take a little bit of practice to follow the workflow correctly. Once you run through the workflow a few times, though, it should become easy to add content to your Joomla site.

Things you can do after reading this chapter include

Organize your Joomla content into categories

Add new content to Joomla

Show your content in various ways, including a full page, a blog with multiple articles, or a long list of articles

Step 1: Categorize

The first step in the Joomla content workflow is to categorize your content. We need to make sure that our information can be usefully organized.

Let’s think about the Joomlaville project we started in the previous chapters. What do we need to include on the website for our visitors? To plan our site’s organization, grab a piece of paper and a pen and brainstorm some ideas.

Go ahead and write down all the articles you want on your site. For this small site, your list might look like this one:

Climate

Location

History

Museum

Zoo

Aquarium

Trains

Buses

Airport

Now that we know what information we want to have on our site, let’s organize it.

Joomla uses categories to organize articles. Let’s create one category for each group of related articles and name it appropriately, as shown in Figure 5.1.

Figure 5.1 The categories and articles for our first Joomla site

Information

Climate

Location

History

Attractions

Museum

Zoo

Aquarium

Transport

Trains

Buses

Airport

Things can get much more advanced, but this is a nice straightforward example to get us started.

Now that we have our plan, we’re ready to start implementing that plan in Joomla. We will use the CASh workflow to create the first category called About and the three articles inside it called “Climate,” “Location,” and “History.” Here’s the process we’ll use:

Step 1. Categorize. Create the Information category.

Create the Information category. Step 2. Add. Write the three articles.

Write the three articles. Step 3. Show. Create menu links so that people can click through and see those articles.

Ready? Let’s get started and use Joomla’s CASh workflow for the first time:

Go to the administrator area and then click Category Manager under the Content drop-down menu. You’ll see a page like the one in Figure 5.2. Notice that Uncategorised and News are already options. The Uncategorised category is used for articles that don’t fit neatly inside any other category. It’s most commonly used for small sites with only five or six articles. With so few articles, you wouldn’t really need to divide them into categories. However, we’ll eventually have at least a dozen articles, so we need to create more categories. Figure 5.2 The Category Manager Click the green “New” button. To get started, we need to fill in just one field: Title. The text in this field should simply be Information. However, to help our visitors, it might be worth entering a short description, explaining what’s in this part of the site. For example, you could say, “This category contains information about Joomlaville.” Your screen should look like Figure 5.3. Figure 5.3 Creating a new category Click Save & Close. You should see that your category has been added, as in Figure 5.4. You’ll see a message that says, “Category successfully saved.” Figure 5.4 The updated Category Manager

Now that we have a category in which to organize our articles, let’s write those articles.