Website Design in Matlock Derbyshire

Joomla! Control Panel Buttons and what they do.

This article follows on from my article about how to Access the Backend of Joomla!.

 

In this article I will explain what each of the buttons in the control panel do.

 

So if you have accessed the Joomla! backend successfully by typing your domain address followed by /administrator, eg. www.yourdomain.com/administrator, and then typed in the correct Username and Password into the text boxes, you should be seeing the screen below.

 

Now, we're going to take a brief look at each button in the main control panel.  You may not be able to see all the buttons shown above.  It really depends on the amount of access you have been given.  The image above shows the buttons for a "Super Administrator".  In this article I go through all the buttons.  If you can't see some of them then just skip that section.

 

Add New Article Button

When creating content for a Joomla! based website we refer to each piece of information or story as an article.

 

 

This button is included in the control panel as this is the one you will probably use most often.  You can use it when you want to add new content to your site.

 

 

Article Manager

If we want to see a list of all the existing articles then we can use this button to view the list.

 

 

 

 

 

Front Page Manager

The common name for the 'Front Page' is the 'Home Page'.  So in Joomla! rather than calling a website's home page the home page, its known as the front page.  Slightly confusing, but if you think of newspaper's front page, the similarity is that the front page will carry information about the content inside the newspaper.  And that's how we think of the home page of a Joomla! site.  Basically the entry point to the rest of the site.

 

With the front page manager we can control which articles and in which order appear on the front page.  For example you might have a news site and you want people to be able to read an introduction to the latest articles, but you don't want the whole article to appear on the front page, because you've got lots of other things you want your visitors to explore as well.

 

So we need to manage our front page with articles and information.  The idea being to tempt our users to discover the parts of our site they are most interested in or indeed the parts we want them to be most interested in.

 

Section Manager and Category Manager

There are two ways to publish an article.  Firstly we can decide to have an uncategorised article.  An uncategorised article will show up in our Article Manager as uncategorised - there isn't a problem with this unless your site is going to have say over 10 pages.  Once your site has more than 10 pages then its safe to say organising your articles into sections and categories may help you in the future especially if you are looking for any particular article.

 

Pre-planning before you build your site can help to save time in the future as if you do decide you want to be organised and keep your articles in sections and categories then its best to set them up right from the start.  Granted you might not know what they will be in the very beginning, but deciding to use them in the first place can be a wise move.

 

The important rule to remember is that if you write an article and you intend to put it into a specific section and category, that section and category must have been set up before you write the article.  If you haven't set up the section and category then your article will have to be saved as uncategorised.

 

To complicate matters slightly, but really this is just a case of getting it straight in your mind, you can't create a category for a particular section until you have created the section itself.

 

If you're confused, I will try to summarise.  The section is the top level of your organisation.  Into which you can put your categories, and then into that you can put your articles.

 

Without a section you can't create a category, without a category you can only save your articles as uncategorised.

 

Why is this important I hear you say.  Well put simply, before you save any article you need to tell Joomla!, which section and category it needs to go in - even if it is to be uncategorised.

 

Media Manager

In the media manager section, Joomla! categorises all of your images into folders.  You can also categorise other media such as videos or flash animations.

 

 

 

 

Menu Manager

In the world of Content Management, which is what Joomla! is, a Content Management System, the Menu Manager is where things can start to get a little confusing.

 

When we speak of a Menu we refer to the navigation menus displayed on your site.  If your site has be planned well then you may have no need to even touch this button.  However, there may come a time when you want to add a new page.

 

Why do we need to manage the menus?  Well, on any particular page you may see two or three different menus.  You may have one overall main menu at the top - this quite often goes horizontally across the page. And then there may be a second menu down the left hand side of the page - this may contain similar links to the top menu and/or more specific links to sections of the site. Or in some cases a page may have separate menus for different sections or categories.

 

To manage our menus and the links within each menu we go through to the Menu Manager.

 

Language Manager

Using the language manager we can control what languages the site is available in.  This applies not only to the frontend, which the user will see, but also the backend.

 

 

 

 

User Manager

If we are running a site where users can become registered members then we can control various aspects to allow or deny groups or individuals access to certain areas of the site.  This is quite a powerful tool, but also useful if you want to allow users to add content to your site or if you want to restrict certain parts of the site to members only.

 

 

Global Configuration

Unless you have been assigned the user group level of Super Administrator you won't be able to see the Global Configuration button.  However, if you have been assigned the role of a Super Administrator then the Global Configuration section is where settings for the site are made.  If you don't understand anything in this section then its probably best left.  This is the nuts and bolts of your site.

 

 

What else is there?

The navigation at the top of the page is a series of drop down menus on which you will be able to access the same parts of the site as the control panel allows you to.

 

To the right of the navigation you will see various bits of information.  You may see Legacy: 1.0 written.  This refers to the sites compatibility with older versions of Joomla!.  Next to that is a Preview button.  Use this if you want to preview your work in your browser.  Next to that we can see how many mails we have to be read and then how many users are logged in.  And finally on the far right a button to allow us to logout from the backend.

 

On the right of the control panel, we have information about the logged in users.  We can also expand the box to find out information about which pages are the most popular, ie those which get the most hits.

 

There is also an overview of the most recently added articles and an overview of the menus.

 

So that's it for the control panel.  The next article will look at how we create new content for our site.