Starting at the top

First off, let's check that the necessary node types are in place. Make sure that you have two node types available on your site, called news and blog. Your node types don't have to have these names exactly - for example, you can use the built-in story type instead of news (in fact, that's what you'll see is being done in the screenshots), or you can use flexinode to create whatever other types you want - but these are the names that will be referred to from this point on in this tutorial.

Next, we're going to begin at the top, by creating the articles containeri. Go to create content -> container, and enter the title and body text of the node. Expand the container information box, and you'll see a whole lot of fields that might, at first, look a bit daunting. Skip the description, help text, admin title, and types fields, and set the hierarchyi field to single. Skip the 5 check boxes below.

The next field, hidden containeri, is one that often confuses many new-comers to the categoryi system. We'll discuss exactly how hidden containers can be used a bit further on. For now, leave this field set to disabled and continue on. The next 2 fields - parenti and weighti - can also be skipped.

Now we come to the depth field. At this time, it would be wise to look back at our site's aims, and to see how we can best meet them. According to our aims, we want all news items to be shown on the news page, and likewise for blog entries. We want all items listed on news and blog, however, to also be listed on articles. The news and blog pages are going to be categories, but articles is a container. Content can be assigned to categories, but it cannot be assigned to a container. So how can we get content listed on the articles page, when we cannot assign anything to it?

We do this by specifying a depth for the container of more than 0. With a greater depth, the container will list content that is assigned to categories below it. Just to be on the safe side, we're going to give the articles container a depth of -1 (infinite), so that all content assigned to pages beneath it gets listed on the root page.

Next, ignore the distant parentis box, and go down to the category display settings box. Set the show prev, next, and up links field to disabled, and leave the link to distant neighbours check boxes unticked. Set the display TOC within this container option to enabled. Leave the depth of TOC box set at 0. Unlike the main depth field, the depth of TOC field treats a depth of 0 as meaning 'show only the direct children of this node'. Leave the show assigned nodei count in TOC and show links to categories on assigned nodes boxes unchecked, but tick the show message if no posts and the show node listings checkboxes.

Finally, we're down to the all-important category menu items box. Set menu items within this container to enabled. This creates a menu item for this container, and for its categories (if we give it any). Leave menu items for assigned nodes set to disabled. It doesn't really matter what you set this to, because we won't be having any categories in this container, and hence we won't be assigning categories to any nodes.

Creating the first container, which will hold everything else, and will list all dynamic content.

That's about it. You can set any other, non-category-related fields on the form to your desired values, and then go ahead and submit the node. Congratulations - you've now got your first container set up!