Site structure on CMS Joomla

I want to devote this article to the structure of the Joomla site, the essence of almost any site comes down to one thing - to provide its users with useful information and a convenient interface for using the site. In practice, not all sites can boast of these qualities, and as a result, users choose more suitable resources for themselves.
One of the most important qualities of a developer is the ability to build the structure of the site: first in your head and then implement all this on your resource.
When designing a site, we take into account 2 components - this is a logical and physical architecture.

Resource logical architecture

The logical architecture contains certain components located on the site - these are articles, subsections and sections. In Joomla, this role is played by categories of materials, menus and materials themselves.
Let me explain it on my fingers, imagine a library containing books structured according to the relevant sections. There are chemistry, physics, and what is not yet available, each section can also be divided, for example, by genre, by year of release, author, etc. As a result, each user will receive exactly the information that interests him.

Come up with something similar for your future site, it is better to draw up the structure in as much detail as possible, it will depend on how you will modify the site in the future and will avoid the appearance of duplicate pages. It is not necessary to think over everything to the smallest detail, but there must be a well-thought-out structure.




Physical site architecture

With the physical structure, everything is a little different, here the main roles are files and folders that are physically located on the server. To avoid chaos in the future, when we save new files, they should have their own folder. We are lucky that in Joomla the physical structure is perfectly organized, and we will only have to decide where to store pictures, video materials, etc. If we talk about writing our own template (templates located in the folder), the configuration also needs to be determined in advance, pictures , files with scripts, styles, etc. Take a look at the example below:



Now we can look at a real-world example. Having sketched a draft diagram of the future web resource, we will transfer it to Joomla. Joomla has special categories for competently organizing user materials. Categories are sections of our site. They can be at the top level or nested (subcategories). First, you go to the category manager page, go to the administrative part of your site (site name / administrator) and in the "Materials" menu you click on the "Category manager" item.



On the page "Category Manager: Materials" we see here one default category, called "Uncategorised", or "Sections (no category)". It depends on which language pack you have installed.



The default category is a kind of storage for content that cannot be categorized into any other category. I do not recommend deleting it, you can simply hide it if you wish, in the future it may come in handy.
How do I create a category?

It is very simple to create a category, we click in the upper left corner "Create".

By clicking you will be taken to the category creation page. This is how it looks:

Let's go through all the fields in detail:


1. Title - here we will write the name of the category, my first category will be called "Site Development". This field is required.


2. Nickname - this field is optional, it will be filled in by the program when you click the "Save" button based on the title. If you still want to fill it out yourself, do it in Latin.


3. Parent - this field is about the nesting of categories, ie. if you choose "No parent", the category will be at the very first level (main section). If you want to split a category, you need to specify the previously created category as the parent one.


4. Status - as the name suggests, here we indicate the status of the category, and there are the following options: published, unpublished, archived and thrown into the trash can. To activate a category, select "Published", if you want to disable a category, select "Unpublished". If you want to delete it, select "In basket".


5. Description - look at the screenshot above. For the first time, I advise you to leave this item alone. You can always adjust it later.


6. Access - this field is used to regulate access rights for certain categories and users, for example, some users may be denied access, and other users may be allowed access. At the beginning of the path, it also makes no sense to go into details, let's leave this field alone and create a category that is accessible to everyone.


7. After filling in all the fields, click the "Save" button. The category is saved and you can keep track of whether the Alias ​​field is automatically filled in. If everything is in order, click "Close" or "Save and Close" and finish working with the first category.
The first category is created, the change is to repeat the same steps to create other categories. I have something similar:






Each category is preceded by the number of items that have been deleted, published or are in the recycle bin and archive. So here we see a kind of structure of our site - already created categories and subcategories.

Deleting a Category

Knowing how to create categories, now we will learn how to delete them. This is necessary if you create unnecessary categories.

It is not difficult to remove them, first you need to place the categories in the basket by checking the box next to the category or categories name and click "Basket":




Categories are marked for deletion, but they remain. You need to go to the basket using the search tools:

Select those that are not needed, then click "Empty Trash".

In the next article, we will learn how to create content and add them to categories.