Sparkem Studio

This article discusses where Joomla will display your content on a web page, and explains Joomla’s terms for different content areas of a site.

Most of the core content of your website will be put in articles and will display in the main center area of your site. What you are reading right now is an article, and you can see it is in the main center content area of the site template. Articles are usually the core page content, and in the Joomla Administration area you will find them listed in the Article Manager.

Modules are additional content areas on a Joomla site. I think of them as little content containers. A module can contain a menu, or some text, or a search box, or an image, or a poll, or many other content items that you may wish to add to your site.

A Joomla template comes with several or many module positions that you can use to display content, separate from the main article.  Module positions vary from template to template. Where they are located and how many are in your template are determined by your template designer. There are almost always modules on the left and right, for example, so you can easily create a three column layout like the one above.

To see how modules might be laid out in a template, visit this page on the rockettheme.com site to see the module positions for their free template, Afterburner.