Day 08-Working With Joomla Section Manager

Welcome to the Day 8 of your Joomla Website Setup series. Yesterday I wrote about the “Introduction To Joomla Section Manager.”Today I am going to discuss how to work on sections in Joomla Section Manager. There are various operations which can be done on Sections in Joomla. Like creating new section, editing a section, copying a section etc. All these are coming to you one by one in today’s tutorials.

Creating A New Section

When you want to create a new section, just access the Section Manager as explained in day 7. Then click on New button in top menu of Section Manager. When you click on “New”, you are taken to the new screen. Now I introduce you to the elements of this screen. The screen looks like below:

Top Menu

In top menu there are four buttons:

1. Save
2. Apply
3. Close
4. Help

Save

When you click on “Save” button after filling out sufficient details, you are taken back to the sections list, in “Section Manager”.

Apply

When you click on “Apply” button after making any changes in the present screen, the details are saved in the database, but you remain on the same screen. You are not taken back to the sections listing until you click on Close or Save button. This is used to test anything you like while editing the section.

If you create new section and click on apply button, the title Section:[New] changes to Section:[Edit].

Close

Clicking on this button takes you back to the sections listing in Section Manger. No changes are saved.

Help

It takes you to the help screen. It’s a new pop-up screen.

Details

In detail section of the screen several parameters are there. Now I am explaining these one by one.

1. Scope
2. Title
3. Alias
4. Published
5. Order
6. Access Level
7. Image
8. Image Position
9. Description

Scope

This option specifies the scope of the content. At present its unchangeable and has value “Content”.

Title

This specifies the Title of the section. It designates the name of the section.

Alias

The alias is used when Search Engine Friendly URLs are used. If you leave this option blank, it’s automatically filled with all small alphabets. All of the spaces, underscores(_) are replaced with hyphen(-). Some other characters like & etc are also replaced. The sole purpose of aliases is for Search Engine Friendly URLs.

Published

Whether you want to publish the section or not.

Order

The order in which the section will appear in the list. New section will always come to last. It can be edited later on in list or in edit screen later on.

Access Level

You can define access level of section to registered, special or public. These terms have been explained in the day 6 article.

Image

You can choose from the images to represent the section.

Image Position

You can define, where the image should appear relative to section. The values are left, right and center.

Description

Here you can write a brief or full description of Section. Also you can include a picture in the description.

We will create a new section with the following details:

Title: Time Management For Business Success

Alias: Leave it blank and it will be saved as: “time-management-for-business-success”

Published: Yes

Access Level: Public

Image: clock.jpg

Image Position: left

Description: Blank

That’s it.

Editing A New Section

To edit a section, simply click on the section title or tick the section and click on Edit button. Rest of the process is same as explained above. The picture shown below is taken while editing a present section. Remember only one section can be edited at a time.

Copying A New Section

To copy a section, just choose the section by clicking title or ticking the section and clicking on Copy. For our example I have chosen “News” section. All of the categories and articles under the section “News” will be copied as “News Copy”. Clicking on Save will bring you back to the sections list. You see the screen below:

That’s all for today. In day 9, I am gonna discuss about Category Manager. Remember to come back and grab your tutorial session.