Introduction

In Joomla, you are allowed to assign your articles and other site content to categories, and therefore, to organize and structure your website in an optimal way. You can assign and group similar articles into a given category. You will also be able to create parent categories and nest subcategories in order to keep everything tidy. In this tutorial, we will step-by-step walk you through the process of creating a new category, which is the first part of creating primary content on your Joomla website.

Accessing the Categories page

To begin, please log in to your Joomla Admin Dashboard and click on the “Categories” shortcut button located on the left-hand side of the Home page.

Afterward, you will be redirected to the “Categories” page, and you will need to click on the green “New” button in order to create a category.

Alternatively, you can navigate through the top menu bar to Content > Categories > Add New Category.

Creating New Category

Now, let’s review the “New Category” page and the information you will need to specify. As you will notice, it is split into four separate tabs. The first “Category” tab is open by default, so we will begin with it.

For a start, you will need to enter the Category “Title” and write a “Description”, which is optional. You can leave the “Alias” field empty as Joomla will fill it for you. It will be used for the Search Engine Friendly URL of the category page. If you want to specify your custom alias, please make sure to replace all spaces with dashes (-) and all capital letters with lower case letters.

At the right end of the page, you will see a few options.

• Parent - This option refers to the category hierarchy. In other words, whether the category is a parent category (in which case you need to leave it set to “No Parent”) or a subcategory (in this case, you will need to select the parent category from the dropdown menu.
• Status - You can select between four options from this dropdown menu: “Published”, “Unpublished”, “Archived” and “Trashed”. They control whether the category will be visible on your website frontend.
• Access - This option allows you to control the level of access to this category based on the user.
• Language - This option allows you to control if the category will be visible in all languages or only in a specific one.
• Tags - In here, you can assign the relevant tags to the content of this category - if any.
• Note / Version Note - These two fields allow you to include optional notes for the category.

Next is the “Options” tab. From here you will be able to select a “Layout” for the category, to include a category “Image” and to configure an “Alt Text” which will be displayed in case the image cannot be loaded for some reason.

From the following “Publishing”  tab, you will be able to schedule the publishing of the category, edit the creation date, and the user who created it, as well as specify the metadata information for the category.

From the last “Permissions” tab, you will be able to modify the permission specifically for this category. Note that this will override the Global Permissions we have previously reviewed in our How to configure Permission Settings in Joomla guide.

When you are ready, please do not forget to click on the “Save” button to finalize the creation of your new category.

All done! Congratulations on learning how to create Article Categories in Joomla. Now you will be able to organize your website and keep everything neat and ordered. We hope you have found the information in this tutorial useful and our guidance easy to follow. In case you have any additional questions on the topic, please do not hesitate to contact our Support Team.