Ramblers Documentation

Training for Webmasters

02.2 Types of Article

There are three main types of Article:

  1. Static

  2. Dynamic

  3. Walk feeds
1 An example of a Static page within Joomla would be the “Introduction” page with general information about the Group. Of course it is not completely static, but is will typically be changed very rarely. Similarly, a page containing a list of Officers can be classed as Static, as it may only be changed once or twice a year.
 2

In contrast, an Article of News will be written, and should then be given prominence until another, more recent, news item is created. At that point, the new article should be placed at the head of the page and the previous one, and all other ones before that, should all be shuffled one place down the pile. This is exactly the way that Joomla is set up to work, and makes it simple and straightforward to manage dynamic pages such as News, Recent social events etc.

Another variant on this is when information is to be published, but only up until a certain date. For example, a page of “Forthcoming Events” should not contain publicity for Events that have already taken place. With Joomla, it is simple to define the date after which an Article need not be displayed, so there is no need to manually edit the site to remove the obsolete Article.
 3  Pages that display the walking programmes derive their information from a "feed" of data provided by the WalksFinder database. As the data in GWEM is updated, the information in the feed automatically changes to reflect these updates. As a result, the page itself that displays the walks does not change at all, but the content within the block of walks does change.

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