A common problem for people when starting to work with umbraco is working our how to create content folders, such as folders for storing news items or other content.
The process is as follows:
Create a new document type called Content Folder or the like (You cannot use the name Folder as that is already in use by the Media Library).
In the newly created document type add the following property:
Name: Redirect to
Alias: umbracoRedirect
Type: Content Picker
The important bit here is the Alias: umbracoRedirect. This is one of the built in umbraco properties. It basically redirects one node to another (making it act like a folder).
You'll need to allow the document types you want to be able to add to the folder by clicking the structure tab and selecting the allowed child nodetypes. In this way you can lock your folder down to only storing document types that make sense i.e. in a News Folder you would only allow News Items (or other News Folders).
You can find out more about some of Umbraco's built in properties in the best practice section of the Wiki.
Comment, (by Per Ploug Hansen)
Best practices on storing news items (or other lists of items) would still in 99% of all sites would be by storing it in it's natural location on the website.
Example: If you want a news-section on the url: domain.com/news.aspx you would:
- Create a page to act as the presentation of news items, this page should have it's own document type. We will call the type "News"
- Create a document type to store all the news data. We will call this document type "News Article" Add whatever properties needed.
- Now allow the "News" Document type under your Frontpage document type and allow the "News article" type under the "News" document type
- Finally create the page "News" under your frontpage, and start adding news articles to it.
The result is: Content is stored in the right location according to the url. You have a tight permission model setup (only allow articles under the News document type) and we have nice urls for everything. with domain.com/news/articlename.aspx etc. And editors and developers don't have to worry about where content is display as they can see it directly in the content tree in the backend.
Another comment (by Petr Šnobelt)
If you have site with lot of news articles, you should use datefolder package