This tutorial is going to show you how to use the Category Manager in Joomla. For the purpose of this tutorial, we will assume that you are logged into your administrative panel of your Joomla site.
Articles are organized into sections and categories in Joomla. Sections are the top level of organization followed by categories, which are ordered by the section they belong to. Click on Content in the upper Menu Bar. Now select Category Manager. This will open a page that lists your categories. Here you can publish, unpublish, move, copy, or delete categories or even create new ones.
To publish a category, select the checkbox in front of the category you wish to publish. Then click on Publish in the upper right menu. To unpublish, select a box, and click on the Unpublish icon in the upper right menu. That will make the green check mark turn into a red x.
To move a category, simply mark the checkbox of the selected category. Click on the Move icon in the upper right corner. This will open a new screen, where you can select a new section for this category. Scroll right, and click save in the upper right corner. To copy a category, select it, and click on the copy icon in the upper right corner. Then on the new screen, choose the section the category will be copied to. Click on the Save.
To delete a category, select the box. Click on Delete in the upper right corner and the section is deleted.
To edit, select the category. Scroll right and select the icon in the upper right that is for Edit. This will open the Category edit window, where you can make any necessary changes. Click Save.
To create a new category, click on New in the upper right menu. A new window will open, with blanks to fill in. The first is a title for your category. The next line is for the "alias", which is an internal name that Joomla uses in the URL if you choose to enable the Search Engine Friendly selection in Global Configurations. Entering an alias is optional, and if you leave it blank, Joomla will create one based on the title. By default, Published is set to yes. If you are not ready to have the category published yet, you will need to change it to no. The next choice you will make is what Section this category will belong to. Select the section from the drop-down menu. The next part is the Access Level, where you will determine what users can access the content in this section. Again, make your choice from the drop-down menu. If you wish to select an image for this section, you do that in the next part. Choose an image, and then select its position. Use the text box to enter a description for this section. Scroll to the top, and click on save. Your new category is now listed in the category manager.
This is the end of this tutorial. You now know how to use the Category Manager in Joomla.