Category Tree - Articles - Outlines and Logic

Joomla "Articles and Categories" first of all should be called "Categories and Articles" or "Menus, Categories, Articles and Tags".  Needless to say there is a lot to get your head around and you need to watch the flowlines more than you might expect.

I am watching them more than I have in the past.

On a certain level it is important to think first that Categories via Menus create your fundamental Outline Tree.  Articles get stuffed in to Categories and have a tendency to avalanche over them.  Categories by themselves, also have content.  The main Tree of a Info Structure is the Category Tree.  With Menus, there become multiple trees, and if they are stacked in certain ways they can indeed come to seem to be one tree.  

Complication in presentation comes when Content is put into each Category.  That is the goal, but once there, it becomes difficult to find the structure for the "trees" (that is a joke".

Today, I did find a nice way to modify this.  I used Easy Layouts (that is a Joomla extension) to place Sub-Categories BEFORE the Articles that are listed in a Category blog.  Doing that it is easier to drill down further, and use breadcrumbs to work back up.  I combine this with showing the Main Menu Structure also in an "Accordion Menu" to the sidebar.  Do notice that that Accordion Menu is only of one of the Menus, not all of them, but since most of the content is there and there is still primary menu structures above, the site (I hope and want to believe) can be navigated better that in the past.

All this being said, I have some ideas I would like to pursue to make this all easier and more natural.  More on that later.

Send me a note if you have any comments or questions. 

Happy Holidays everyone.