Organizing Content
So far you’ve seen how to add and edit content on the CACVoices site, but without clear organization, this can quickly become a mess. However, by utilizing your folders, you can organize your content in such a way that will make maintain your site easy.

A folder is the simplest and most powerful mechanism for organizing content and works just like a folder or a directory on a computer’s hard drive. A folder can contain any item of content; content can be copied and pasted between folders, and of course folders can contain other folders. To organize content that’s spread all over a site, a more sophisticated and less-used tool called a topic is available. A topic searches the CACVoices site and finds all objects that match a certain criteria, allowing you to group lots of disparate content.

Using Folders
A folder is just like a folder or a directory on a hard drive, except that the folder and its contents exist inside the CACVoices site. You use a folder the same way; when you need to categorize content or make things a little clearer, you can group items and place them in a folder. To add a folder to your site, select Folder from the drop-down list. This will add a folder and take you to the edit properties page for that form.

A folder has three attributes that a user can edit: Name, Title and Description. They also have two green tabs that represent slightly different views: contents and view. The contents tab will always take you to the contents for that folder.

Viewing the Contents of a Folder
The folder has the concept of a default page, which is a page that will be shown to the user when they view a folder. It’s a concept taken from Web sites where viewing a folder on a Web site shows a default page if one is present; often that default page’s name is index.htm or index.html. If a folder has a default page, then clicking the view tab will show that default page. If the folder doesn’t have a default page, then it’ll show a folder listing of all the content in that folder.

When looking for a default page to display, CACVoices looks through the folder for content with a certain name and shows this item. The page name is usually index.html or index_html; however, the site administrator can add or alter these names. This contents view of a folder allows a user to perform a variety of tasks, such as move content, rename it, delete it, publish it, and change the order it’s listed. Each row of the table shows the title of the content (plus an icon), the type, its size, when it was last modified, its current workflow status, and order selectors.

On the left is a checkbox to select the items you want to change and a series of options across the bottom: Rename, Cut, Copy, Delete, and Change Status. These functions are all pretty self-explanatory, and you can apply them to multiple objects at once by clicking several checkboxes. Contents of a folder after I’ve added some of the content types described in this chapter For example, to quickly rename a piece of content, click that item’s checkbox and then click Rename. This will open the rename form and allow you to rename the title of each item in that list. Click Save to have the changes take effect. The Cut and Copy buttons allow you to copy or move content between different folders. The Delete button allows you to delete the item from your CACVoices site. Just like on your hard drive, if you copy, move, or delete a folder, all the contents of the folder will also be moved, copied, or deleted. 

You can also change the default order of items in a folder. By default, items in a folder will display in the order the items were added. If one item is more important and needs to be moved to the top, use the arrows on the right side of the table to move the item. Publishing a Folder Folders have a much simpler workflow than documents. Earlier in this chapter you saw how to publish content to make it publicly visible because this allows users to create and edit content as much as possible before pushing it live. However, folders are a little different because they contain content but don’t have any content of their own. For this reason, folders have no review state. Anyone can directly publish or make private folders, so there are three states: private, visible, and published. After adding a folder, select Publish from the drop-down list. Then it’ll show up in the navigation. As per the earlier rules for workflow, if you don’t publish a folder, it won’t show up in the navigation.

Adapted from Alexander Limi's Plone Documentation