Day 09-Working With Joomla Category Manager

Welcome to the Day 9 of your Joomla Website Setup series. Today I am introducing you to Joomla Category Manager. All articles in Joomla website are created under categories and all sections have categories. Now, we’ll discuss Category Manager. Almost all of the options available for Category Manager are same as “Working With Joomla Section Manager” or “Introduction To Joomla Section Manager.” except the few. So, I’ll be omitting those from this discussion and discuss only the ones which are new.

 

What is Category Manager

Categories are created under sections. And one category can belong only to one section. In Category Manager we create categories. In Joomla an article can belong only to a single section and single category.

 

How To Access Category Manager

Category Manager is accessed through Administration Control Panel or Content Menu item of top menu as shown in the picture below:

 

 

Clicking on Category Manager takes us to ” Category Manager” area of administration. The Category Manager looks like the picture below:

 

 

Elements of Category Manager Environment

The Category manager environment has several elements. These are listed and explained as below:

 

Category Manager Top Menu Portion

1. Publish
2. Unpublish
3. Move
4. Copy
5. Delete
6. Edit
7. New
8. Help

 

Category Manager Listing Portion

1. Filter
2. Select Section
3. Select State
4. Title
5. Published
6. Order
7. Access Level
8. Section
9. #Active
10. #Trash
11. Id

 

 

Category Manager Top Menu Portion

 

Move

When you tick on one or more than one categories and then press move button in top menu, the categories and the articles under those categories are moved to the new section, selected from move screen. This action asks you for the name of the new section where you wanna move the categories.

 

 

Category Manager Listing Portion

Rest of options are similar to Section Manager. The ones which are new will be discussed here.

 

Select Section

This is the filtering option. Normally you see the list of all of the categories. When you select a section from this list then you see only those categories which belong to that particular section.

 

Select State

This has filtering box has two options

1. Published
2. Unpublished

 

If you select Published then only published categories will be shown here. Selecting unpublished will show only unpublished categories.

 

Section

When you click on Section in the header row, the categories are sorted by Sections they belong to. Subsequent clicking results in reversing the order of sorting.

 

#Active

This shows the number of articles under that particular category. It does not matter whether the articles are published or not.

 

ID

This is the id of the category. It uniquely identifies the category. Any two categories can not have same id. So due to this you can have multiple categories with the same name.

 

 

Creating A New Category

When you want to create a new category, just access the Category Manager as explained above. Then click on New button in top menu of Category 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

 

All of the options have been discussed in previous article under Working With Section Manager.

 

Details

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

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

 

Title

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

 

Section

This specifies the Section under which the new category will be created. One category can be under one section only.

 

We will create a new category with the following details:

Title: Time Management

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

Published: Yes

Section: Time Management For Business Success

Access Level: Public

Image: clock.jpg

Image Position: left

Description: Blank

 

That’s it.

 

Editing A Category

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

 

Copying A Category

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

 

 

Moving A Category

To move a category, just choose the category by ticking the category and clicking on Move. For our example I have chosen “Latest” category. The category itself and all of the articles under the category “Latest” will be moved to the “News” section as I have chosen. Clicking on Save will bring you back to the categories list. You see the screen below:

 

 

That’s all for today. In day 10, I am gonna discuss about Article Manager. Remember to come back and grab your tutorial session.