Categories and the Blog layout

Sometimes you may want to display more than one article on a particular page. This short guide will explain how you can create a "News Page" blog that will display various articles that are indexed in sections and categories.

Creating a basic Joomla site | Improving Appearance | Categories & Blog Layouts | Access Control Levels | Installing Extensions

Sections

When we previously set up our three articles (“home”, “about us” and “contact us”) we applied them to the section “uncategorized”. New sections can be created to index particular articles together. To do this, go to the main control panel and select Content > Section Manager.

Then click on the green new icon on the right.

Give your section a title (eg. “news”), enter a brief description in the content box at the bottom of the screen then click on the save icon on the right hand side.

You can only apply an article to a section if the section has at least one category, and you can not create a category without first creating a section. Which brings us to…

Categories

A category is a sub-section. It allows the indexing of articles to be even more precise. Therefore under the “News” section you could have the categories “sports”, “films”, “current affairs” or “weather”. And you can list all the articles belonging to a section on one page (or all the articles belonging to a category on one page).

To create a section, go to the main control panel and select Content > Category Manager. Then click on the green new icon on the right.

Give the category a title, select from the drop down box which section the category will fall under (eg. “news”), enter a brief description in the content box at the bottom of the screen and then click on save.

Repeat this process to create other categories (eg. “films”, “sports” and “weather”) then create a few articles as per normal, but this time allocate them to your new section and to a category.

The Blog Layout

To display all your articles of a particular section on one page, go to the main control panel and select Menus > Main Menu.

Then click on the green new icon on the right hand side.

Now select Articles > Section Blog Layout to create a menu item that displays a list of articles belonging to a particular section.

Give it a title, select the section you wish to display and set description to show (if you wish the short section description to be displayed at the top of the screen).

The basic parameter settings let you control the layout of the articles within the blog layout. We recommend applying the following settings…

#Leading: 0 (to display no leading articles at full width)
#Intro: 5 (to display 5 articles maximum on the page)
Columns: 1 (to display the articles in 1 column)
#Links: 5 (to display 5 links maximum at the bottom of the screen to articles not displayed on this page)

Click on Parameters Advanced to reveal more settings, including the order in which you want the articles displayed and whether you want to enable an RSS feed.

There are even more settings on the Parameters Component section. These are very similar to the Article Manager’s parameters section and any changes here will override the settings configured there. We recommend setting Show Article Title and Title Linkable to “Yes”, Show Intro Text to “show” and Read More to “show” (this enables the Read More link, which is explained later on).

When finished click on Save.

Now when you check the preview link your menu item should list all your sectioned articles in a similar format to this…

…and clicking on each article title take you to that specific article.

You can also create menu items to display articles belonging to categories, by selecting Category Blog Layout.

Read More…

The Read More button is located below the content box on the article page. Clicking on it adds a separation line within your article.

Anything above this line will be included on the Article Section Blog Layout along with a read more link.

Anything below the line can only be viewed if the user clicks on the read more link.

Therefore your blog now displays the teaser text of all your articles and clicking on the read more link can either display the remainder of the article or the whole article (depending on whether the Show Intro Text parameter is set to “show” or “hide”).

Publishing Dates

Articles can be easily unpublished by clicking on the icon in the Article Manager’s publish column. This will remove the article from the blog layout without actually deleting the content.

However you can also set publishing dates for each individual article. By default the article is set to start publishing as soon as it is created and the finish publishing date is set to never. To change these simply click on the calendar tab beside the date and select your new dates.

Click on Save to apply the changes.