Categories
Group LENA albums using Joomla categories.
Categories group albums so they can be published as one grid. LENA uses Joomla’s standard category manager.
Creating a category
- Go to Components → LENA → Categories.
- Select New.
- Enter the category title.
- Select a parent category if you are creating a hierarchy.
- Set Published and the intended access level.
- Save the category.
Other fields, such as description, note, metadata and language, come from Joomla’s standard form. The LENA 1.0 frontend displays the selected category’s title but not its description.
Category form tabs
The exact layout may vary slightly between Joomla 5 and 6, but the standard form covers:
- Category — title, alias, parent, status, access, language, tags, note and description;
- Publishing — creation and modification details and page metadata;
- Permissions — inherited rules for creating, deleting, editing, editing state and editing own items in this part of the tree.
The title names the category. Album visibility depends on publication state, access level and the same settings in parent categories. A category’s Language field does not assign a language to albums because a LENA 1.0 album has no language field of its own. On a multilingual website, control publication primarily through the language and associations of menu items.
Assigning albums
Select a category on the album form’s Other tab. This assignment is optional.
State and access
An unpublished or inaccessible category hides from the frontend:
- that category’s page;
- albums assigned to it, including attempts to open an individual album directly.
Hiding a parent category also hides its descendants. Albums have their own state and access level as well, and both sets of restrictions must allow display.
Deleting a category
Before deleting, check which albums are assigned to it and which menu items point to it. Depending on Joomla’s standard safeguards, deletion can be blocked while the category contains items. It is safer to move the albums to another category or set them to No category, then update the menu items.