Joomla: Multi Page Posting

Sean^DCT4

Hi all,

I've been looking at doing the following over the last week on and off.

From the attached picture can anyone give me any pointers as to how I setup Joomla so that when a user clicks on one of the links in the Sidebar DIV the Main Content DIV is replaced completely depending on the URL clicked?

Basically I want to use the functionality of Joomla on this site but not have the blogging look and feel to it. I suppose what I want is Joomla behind the scenes to allow me manage the pages easily.

Should the Sidebar URLs be a list of Sections or Categories?


Thanks in advance.

Dagmar

Not sure I understand you but it sounds like you don't have quite the idea of Joomla.

Please don't take offence if I go over what you may already know: the basics of Joomla is that their are:

Sections and below them Categories.

You can have any amount of either and they can be named as you wish, they are a little like a directory structure on your hard disk but essentially they can only be two 'layers' deep. Every 'article' you publish has to be in a Category and each Category must be in a Section.

So, as an example, you could have Sections called:

Red, Blue and Green

And categories in each Section called, say:

Red/earth
Red/sky
Red/sea

Blue/cars
Blue/bikes
Blue/trucks

(and you could have the same categories names in another section):

Green/cars
Green/bikes
Green/trucks

In the menus, you can link to any Section, Category or article directly. So if you make a menu item linking to a Section or Category you can specify if a list of article titles or a page of the full articles themselves. There are various other options as to how these will display.

What Joomla does not do easily is Categories or tags in quite the way blogs do (so that you can not apply multiple tag/categories to each article so they appear under many categories). There are ways to achieve this but not within the core structure and you can certainly put meta tag information in each article

When you mention the look and feel I wonder if you are perhaps looking for a Joomla template that controls the way the Joomla site looks? There are many free templates available, just do a search.

If you want to reduce the blog-like 'clutter' on the pages you can remove any or all of the items that display at the top of each article like dates and author, email, pdf and so on.

Joomla is a very powerful framework for organising a web site but it may be more than you need for a simple site.

There are ways, as I said, to make joomla look very simple, design wise, but as with many things it is hard to make it look simple :-)

Hope this is a help.

All the best ~ Dave

Sean^DCT4

Ah yeah I knew all that.

I literally was being lazy after a few searches on Google so I posted here. I didn't give a very good explanation as to what I wanted/needed.

I have it sorted now as I wanted it, and have even managed to embed my sub-domain, that was written in .NET, inside a Joomla wrapper thingy.

Thanks for the good explanation though Dagmar.

Dagmar

Hi Sean

Well yes, it does seem a bit of a shame as it took me a while to type that all out but I guess I have learnt something now and others may still benefit.

It did take me a while to 'get' some of the basic concepts back in the day when Joomla was Mambo...

Not sure what wrapper do for your page rank as they are essentially iframes I believe but maybe that is not an issue for you.

~ Dave