Creating a web page in Joomla is a simple thing. Every page is called in Joomla as Article. Before you start to create pages for your site, you should create a site map. The site map will show you how to structure your articles. Basically there will be pages what are cannot put into any structure. These are called Uncategorized articles. These articles are like 'Contact us', 'About us'.
If you have a good sitemap, you will see the structure in it. You have to imagine the structure in Joomla as a big cabinet. Each cabinet is called in Joomla as Section. In each cabinet (Section) you can create more drawers. Drawers are called in Joomla as Categories. In each category you can create one or more articles. In this way articles will be structured. There is no more level of categories in Joomla, so you have to create the sitemap very carefully. Finally you will have to create the final Section/Category/Article structure. You will find more in the Site Map documentation.
Simple page creation
To create a simple uncategorized page is very simple.
1) Creating the page itself.
2) Make the page available on the site.
To create a page, open the Content/Article Manager with the menu or with the icon on the Control panel.
On the article manager you will see all articles listed in a table.
On this page each article has different attributes. The first is the name of the article which helps you to identify the article. The next one is the Published icon. You can change the publish status simply click on the icon beside each article. The icon itself will show you the current publishing status. You can check the meaning of each icon on the bottom of the page. The next icon is the Front Page icon. The Front Page is a special page of your website and will be covered later in this training. You can check the Front Page icon to ON if you would like to see your article on the Front Page. The next column is the Order column. You can set up the ordering in each category, but for the Uncategorized article, we won't use this option. The Access Level option will show you the accessibility of the article. (You can restrict the access for an article, but this is for the advanced users.)
The next two option is the Section and Category. If these fields are empty, the article does not belong to any section or category in the system. Last you can see the author, date, hits and ID information.
To create a new article, just press the New button on the right hand side.
This action will open a new page for you with an empty article.
On this page you should fill the Title and Title Alias fields first. The Title field will be the title of your article, and it will be automatically formatted and placed on the page.
Note: The Title alias can contain only alphanumeric characters and some special characters. If you need space, you can use underscore instead. (Title: "About Us", Title Alias: "About_Us")
The big white area, below these Tools, is where you can type in or paste text from other documents (the content that you want to display on-line on this page). You can also add images, links, etc. to this area.
Once you finish press Save (at the top on the right).
Tip: If a new web site is being set up, it is often best to create all these web pages first (without adding any content) and to create the Menu items for the pages before going back to add content to each page.
One way to make your page available is creating a menu item to access the page
To create a way to access that page from the Menu, simply select the Menus/(Menu name) from the main menu of Joomla.
Note: Maybe you have more than one menu. You have to select the correct one, so before pressing the New button, you have to be sure about that you are in the right menu.
This will open a page where you can see all the menu items that have been created previously for that menu, if any (some of them will be there as default, as part of the system).
Click on New and it will open a page where you have to set what type of menu item you are going to create. You can create different types of menu item. For now we would like to create a menu item for an article, so on the following page please first click on the Article item to open the accessible list for the Articles.
Note: You can read more about the menu items and possible visibility of the articles in the ‘Menus and Atricles’ document.
To open a simple article with the menu item, select the Article Layout item from the list. If you clicked on the item, a new window will show up on the screen. This will be the menu item details panel.
On this page you have to fill the most important fields for the menu item.
- Title: This will be the menu item title on front page. You will see this when you open the site.
- Alias: This is the name for the backend. This name will help you to find the correct menu item easily. At this time this should be the same as the Title.
- Parent Item: This field will tell to the system where should the menu item appear in the menu structure. At the moment we have to select ‘Top’ as we would like to see our menu item on the front page. If you would like to built a menu structure with submenus, please read the ‘Menus and Articles’ document.
Finally on the right hand side there is a ‘Select Article’ field. To select the correct article, press the Select button.
The Select button will open an inside window and list all of the articles of your site. On the top of this screen you can select the correct Section and Category to find the document, or you can fill the filter field and press the Go button to search for the document.
To select the correct article you have to click on the title of the article.
After this point you do not have more to do just press the Save button in the top menu and enjoy the result on the Frontend.