Content

The most important thing to know about your content is that it is organized in Sections, Categories and Content Items.

So at the top we get Sections. Each Section can have multiple Categories, and each Category has multiple Content Items. Content Items are ultimately what you will see on your web pages. Your content is published through a menu item, as we already mentioned. So you can decide whether you want to show a section, with all its categories, or a category, with all its content items, or the content items directly.

The relationship between Sections, Categories and Content Items is very straightforward, simple and rigid. In other words, there aren’t any options of letting a Content Item belong to more than one Category, or more than one Category to a Section.

You create new content in the Content manager, found under the Content menu on the Joomla administrator backend menu bar.

The tricky thing here is that you can add content and publish it but it will never appear if you don’t link it to a menu item.

Click here to watch a video tutorial of how to add a Section.

Click here to watch a video tutorial of how to add a Category.

Click here to watch a video tutorial of how to add a Content Item. 

Please remember that you need to be logged in in order to watch the video tutorials 

Then there are two other types of content:
Static pages and Components.

Static pages are content pages that do not belong to Sections or Categories. If you want to, you can build your whole site just with Static pages (also only visible if linked to a menu item).

Components are where the real power of Joomla comes to the fore! Components are applications that are written to provide interactive functionality of some sorts to your website.

For example, you can get a Forum component that will install a Forum inside your Joomla website. Or you can get a photo gallery component to manage and display your photos.

Components can become very complex so I won’t be going into them too much for now – you just need to realize that a) components are also only visible on the front end if you link it to a menu item and b) components normally have complex parameters that govern the behaviour on the front end. These parameters are adjusted through the Components menu option in the Joomla administration backend.

End of Tutorial 1

You might want to watch Tutorial 2 - Managing Menus as well

You might want to watch Tutorial 3 - Installing Components, Modules and Templates, as well