Module Content

The last type of content is a module. The content presented in a module is very different from static or dynamic content, or components. In all three of the first types, the content is presented in the main body of the web pages. The template designer actually has to give a snippet of code
to set the “placeholder”. Modules however can be anywhere on page. Most commonly you will find them around the edges; the top, sides and bottom.

Having said that modules are a type of content, that is not strictly true. Some types of module take in data rather than output data. An example of this is the login module. The default modules on a default Joomla installation are:

Name	Description
Banner	Presents links of a menu
Login Form	Shows a form to log in or create account
Syndicate	Shows RSS feed links that viewers can use to syndicate to the home page
Statistics	Shows various site stats
Template Chooser	Allows user to change template of site on the fly
Archive	This module shows a list of the calendar months, which contain Archived items.
Sections	Shows a list of all Sections configured in your database
Related Items	Shows links of content items that have similar keywords
Wrapper	Presents another URL inside an iframe (a page within a page)
Polls	Shows polls from the poll component
Who’s Online	Shows number of viewers currently on the site
Random Image	Shows a random image
Newsflash	Shows a random content item from a chosen category
Latest News	Shows link list to most recently published content items
Popular	Shows link list of most popular content items (by page view)
Search	Shows a search box
User	A special module that is created by the administrator. It can contain either RSS feeds or any sort of html.

We won’t go into too much detail about how modules work. There are a number of settings/parameters related to their function in the index.php, the template file that controls all the presentation on the site.

Sections and Categories, Static items, Blogs and Tables

One of the hardest parts of content management for those new to it is to figure out is how content is organized. The relationship between sections, categories, blogs and tables can be very confusing.

To get a better idea of how a content managed site can be organized, let’s make a sitemap for an imaginary site. This is a standard planning tool used by web designers and is critical for a content managed web site. It’s usually shown as a tree diagram showing all the pages in the site. Here is our example.



In this sitemap, each web page is represented by a box. The lines are links within the site. A sitemap represents viewer path through a site rather than content organization. It is still a useful planning tool for organizing the site, however. Here there are seven pages, but from an organizational point of view, it seems like there are four main areas of the site:

• About Us
• Widgets
• Contact Us
• Widget Blog

The first step in trying to understand how our content management system structures its content is to realize there are no pages! OK, so what does that mean? Remember, the content is stored in the database and needs to be placed onto the pages by the content management system. The CMS has spaces on its pages to place content and needs to know what content it should put there. CMS only knows what content should be used once you click on a link. Once the viewer has done this, CMS now knows what page to generate, gets the content, and puts it into place. Consider a very different example, a magazine. You turn to the index, look something up, get the page number and turn to that page. For that page to be filled with content, the magazine author/designer needed to have chosen the content and arranged it as they wanted on that page. So you turn to it and you see the content. This seems a daft example but it illustrates very well how pages are generated in a CMS. On a CMS site, you click on a link (the magazine index) and then the content is generated and arranged on the page. So in the magazine case the pages exist before you go to it, but on a CMS web site, the page only exists once you visit it. Strange but true.


The filing cabinet is the website, the dropdown folders are the sections, the manila folders are the categories and the paper is the content. To continue the example, static content would be loose sheets of paper in a stack at the bottom of the cabinet. That’s why bigger sites need to use the section/category model- it organizes the information. I am not sure what a component would bemaybe a rolodex on top of the cabinet.

So one way to organize our content might be like this:

Sections	About Us	Services	Widget Blog
Categories	About Us	Blue Widgets Green Widgets	Widget Blog

The services categories work fine and make sense, the other two seem to duplicate the content level. This is because the content hierarchy for that area is only one “level” deep. You end up with a redundant level. There are two solutions to this.

First and perhaps the easiest is to make all single level items static content. We have already seen that this is easy to set up. The down side is that the site can quickly become difficult to maintain. I have found this to happen when there are more than 10-15 static items, mainly because Joomla provides no organization for them so they are all lumped into one group.The second solution is to be more creative with our sections/categories. For example, we could have just a single section, let’s call it “AllContent”. Then we have all the sections inside it:

Sections	All Content
Categories	About Us Blue Widgets Green Widgets Widget Blog

Or we might have something in between. This problem often occurs with smaller sites with not too much content. In those instances you have to get creative.In our example it might be good to use both. A single static item for About Us and then two sections for Services and the blog. The Widget Blog is a good candidate for its own category and section because they tend to have lots of entries. Even though there is a redundant layer of structure, it will easier to keep organized in the site.

The Front Page Component

When we were selecting what type of link to have, we saw that that a menu link can link to a component. The default Joomla installation has a number of pages that are actually components: the contact us page, the search page, the news feeds page and the front page component. None of these really have content items of their own, but pull their content from various places, either within the Joomla site database (contacts) or even other sites (RSS newsfeeds). Basically a component is a mini application that presents data in the main body of a Joomla site in some fashion. A good example of a component is a forum. The content presented is highly specialized and different from the rest of the site.

In almost every case (except this one) all components installed are in the Components menu. The Frontpage component is unique in Joomla in that it is not managed from anything in the Components menu, but rather in the Frontpage Manager in the Content menu. Quite simply, the Frontpage component allows the publishing of any content item in a Joomla site’s database on the front/home page regardless of where it appears on the site.

The home page of your site doesn’t have to be controlled by the Frontpage manager. Sometimes more control over its layout is needed, or some other requirement. The first item in the main menu will be the home page of your site. In the default Joomla installation this is set to be the Frontpage manager, but it could just as easily be a static content item, a table, or another component. Just remember, whatever is first in the list will be your front page or home page. One thing you need to be careful of is some issues with item ID in this relationship.

The Least You Need to Know

Let’s say we have a simple website of three pages, a “Home” page, an “About Us” page and a “Services” page.


In the Content menu is the Static Content Manager. We have two static content items we have created, “About Us” and “Services”. These are created by simply clicking the new button. An editor appears and you can fill in the information you want (we’ll look more at adding content
later).
















As we just discussed, the hardest thing for users to realize about a content managed site is that content does not exist by itself on the pages of their website, only in the database. Content is only shown on the website when it is linked to from a menu- that is, it’s the menus that determine the content of a content managed site, not the content items. Sure, content is there in the database, but it will only appear once we link to it in a menu somewhere. A consequence of this is that you have to create the content first and then the links to it. This is true for all content that is in the “main body” of your pages2; the content items must have a link to them to cause them to appear on the site. Just to increase the confusion, they must also be “published” in the content item manager. You can see that our two items above are published. Let’s create a small menu to point to these two content items.