Quickly and Easily Create Sections and Categories

Sunday, 03 August 2008 16:00

Sections and Categories are perhaps the most difficult concept to learn in Joomla. Other people have done a much better job than I ever could at explaining what they do, so if you're not sure what they do, read up.

Once you get the concept down and you've worked out your sections and categories, it's not unusual for a large site to have five to ten different sections with the same number of categories. You could be looking at upwards of 100 categories. While it's not hard to create sections and categories, it can be time consuming to:

1. Click Section Manager
2. Click New
   
3. Type a Title
4. Click Save
5. Repeat for each Section
6. Click Category Manager
7. Click New
   
8. Type a Title
9. Select a Section
10. Click Save
11. Repeat for each Category

Often this can be extremely time consuming. Luckily, there's help.

Enter MassContent.  It's a handy component that will allow you to create multiple sections, categories, and articles really quickly. Here's a screen shot:

As you can see, you can use MassContent to quickly create all of your sections. Just type in all of the titles into the Title field. I usually click "Copy Title to Name" under Options.

This is how I recommend to use it:

1. First go through and create all of your sections
2. Then create all of your categories per section
3. Finally, if you have content ready to go, use that function last.

You do have to break up your categories and do them for each section, but holy cow does this save time.