G'day all,

I've downloaded and installed joomla! 1.5 on my webhost space and I'm pretty pleased with what I've heard about it's capabilities.

Unfortunately I havn't quite got my head around the way this cms works. I am employed by a dental surgery who have asked me to re-design our website after a stint with some rather unreliable designers.

I am planning to map the site as a 3 layer site. I'm not sure what you call what i'm calling layers. What I mean is the main menu would have Home, About, Contact, and Blog.

Within, for example, 'About' I would like an index page with a small body of text, and a menu for Meet The Team, History, Meet The Dentists, and Services.

Then within 'Services' I would like an index page with a small body of text, and a menu for Facilities, Therapies, and Payment options.

This will probably not be the final set of menus but that's what I mean by 3 layers. About>Services>Facilities... 3 layers... Am I making sense? haha

What I am wondering is how it would be set out purely through the cms side of joomla and a more generic site (like the hot looking new 'Helio') and also if it is possible to run that type of site in a simpler site like 'fold' or 'scroller' (also both good looking templates!)

I don't quite get how Sections, Categories, and Articles work with or apply to an active, multi-page website.

Thanks if anyone can simplify the explanations in the already patronisingly simple Beginning Joomla! .pdf I would be so grateful.

Cheers,

Jack

Perhaps... with the simpler one-page templates such as the aforementioned 'Fold' template, would a link( leading to a lightbox containing the desired page)within a slide do the trick?

Hi Jack,

There are some good questions in there and I think they are important to ask before you set the site up. Its much easier to work on a joomla site that has a good foundation, although you can change things later on.

Here is a intro guide to Joomla: http://www.netshinesoftware.com/joomla/joomla-tutorial.html I just did a quick google search and thats one that turned up. It looks like it covers a lot of the basics and will answer some of your questions better than I will be able to do here.


In Joomla menu items can link to content organised as single content items, a list of items or a blog of items. So for links that need only go to one content item like the about us page I would link to a content item, but for the blog I would either use the link to a blog category or a blog section depending on the needs of the blog.


Fold, Scroller and Slider are really like business card templates. Just one page loads and you slide through a number of different module positions. If your site will have a deeper structure other than contact, clinic, about etc than they are not really suited to this type of template. The three templates mentioned wont really be able to handle an indepth news or blog page for instance.


Depending on the site I am building I sometimes dont need to use more than one section. As an example the content hierachy for your site might look something like this:

general (section) --> About Us (category) --> About Us (content Item)
general (section) --> About Us (category) --> Finding the Clinic (content Item)
general (section) --> Modalilites (category) --> Modalities (content Item)
general (section) --> Blog (category)

Hope that helps,

Anthony.

Thanks so much for that explanation!

Another quick question. If I wanted to add another level in the heirachy, would it be a section>category>category>content item?

Thanks

Edit: also, how far off would you approximate the 1.5 native version of helio is?

Depends .. it might look like this:

section1>category1>content item
section1>category2>content item

section1>category1>content item
section2>category1>content item




Coming very soon