You've already created a good deal of categories without altering any of the default settings. In some cases, however, you may want to have some more control over the category details. In the following table you can see the options that are available in the Category Manager:
Edit An Articles Category/Add A New Articles Category screen.
The screen is organized in five main sections, accessible through tabs: Category Details,
Publishing Options, Options, Metadata Options, and Category Permissions. These screens
allow you to enter more details on the contents of the category (by adding a description), to determine whether a category is visible or not for specific user groups, and so on.
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Let's have a look at the options that are available when creating or editing a category.
Adding or editing categories: an overview of the settings
Title The category title as it will be displayed. You can use lowercase, uppercase, and spaces.
Alias Leave the Alias box blank. The Alias is the internal name of the item. When you save the category, Joomla will automatically fill in the category name in lowercase letters without spaces or special characters. If the
Title is About CORBA, the alias will be about-corba. The Alias will be
shown in the page URL (www.example.com/about-corba. html) when using Joomla's search engine-friendly URLs (see Chapter 12, Attracting Search Engine Traffic: SEO Tips and Techniques, on attracting
search engine traffic).
Description In the Description text editor area, you can enter and format a short descriptive text introducing the subject of the category.
Category descriptions can be displayed at the top of pages displaying category contents (provided the Category Description
is set to Show in the Advanced options of the menu link pointing to that category overview page).
For more on category descriptions, see Chapter 7, Welcoming your Visitors: Creating Attractive Home Pages and Overview Pages, on
category overview pages.
Details
Parent Select - No parent to create a top-level category or select any of the existing categories to add a subcategory.
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Status The status can can be Published (visible on the front of the site),
Unpublished (not visible on the site, but still visible in the backend),
Archived (moved to the archive; you can make archived articles/ categories visible with a special menu link), or Trashed (moved to the
trash).
Unpublishing categories can be useful when your site is live and you're preparing a new category. Using this option, your site visitors won't know the category is there until you publish it.
Access By choosing the appropriate Access setting, you control who have access to this category: all visitors (Public), registered users (Registered),
or users with special rights (Special). The default value, Public, should
be okay. When you start working with different user types on your site, you can change these settings (see Chapter 9, Opening Up the Site: Enabling Users to Log In and Contribute, on user access levels).
You can also create special access levels.
Language If you have a multilingual site, this drop-down list box allows you to select the language for this category.
The Publishing Options tab
Created by Select the user who will be displayed as the author of this category
The Options tab
Alternative
Layout A category, provided the selected template (or component) allows for powerful feature that lets you select a custom layout for the current these additional layout options. A template may contain so-called template overrides, custom layouts that overrule Joomla's default layouts of categories. More information can be found on http:// tinyurl.com/jlayouts (a shortcut URL pointing to http:// downloads.joomlacode.org/trackeritem/5/8/6/58619/ introtoaltlayoutsinversion1-6v2.pdf).
Image This option affects how overview pages of category contents are displayed. At the top of these pages an image and a short description can be shown. Here you can select the image that will be displayed with that description. However, you can also choose to insert an image into the description itself, as shown on the previous page in the example
given under Description.
Note This little feature can prove to be really useful: in the Note field, you can add notes for yourself or for others who have access to the backend. For example, you can describe the purpose of the category ("New generic category on club activities").
The Metadata Options tab Meta
Description Metadata are added to the HTML document source code. It's the information that's not displayed on the web page, but search engine spiders do process it. Metadata for a category override global metadata
or menu item metadata. You can add a short Meta Description and
Meta Keywords for categories. Not all search engines use Meta
Keywords to index content, but the Meta Description is certainly important. For example, Google uses it search results pages to describe the page contents.
Meta Keywords
Author Add a Meta Author to make it possible for search engines to display the author of the document.
Robots The Robots meta tag is used to indicate whether search engine spiders should index the contents of this category or not.
The Category Permissions tab
Public, Guest,
and so on The user groups are allowed to work with this category. An example is that Category Permissions tab allows you to determine what different you can determine which user groups can edit or create content in this category. You can read more about permissions in Chapter 9, Opening Up the Site: Enabling Users to Log In and Contribute.