Create and Edit Content

The first step, assuming you are already logged into the administration section of your site, is to open the Article Manager. Click on the Article Manager icon in the control panel, or select it from the menu Content > Article Manager.

The Article Manager Toolbar is shown below.

Before you start creating artilces, give some thought to how what the default display parameters should be. The button Paramters sets defaults for all articles. This can be overridden for specific articles but it is easier to set it once than to set it individually for each article. For details on the paramters see the Parameters section below (look under Advanced).

To create a new article click on the New icon in the toolbar (3^rd from right).

Many options can be configured from the Article edit screen. The following image shows the top-left portion of the screen.

To create a new article, fill out the form with a Title (and alias - a short title); indicate the Section and Category the Article should belog to (drop down lists); indicate whether you want the article to be immediately published once you save it. Say “No” if you want to keep it as a draft. Also indicate whether this will appear on the front page of your website.

Under the information section is an editing toolbar and the content section where you write your article. Your toolbar may look difference depending on what editor (if any) you have chosen. It generally defaults to a wysiwyg (What you see is what you get) editor and the toolbar provides buttons to format your content. There are several Joomla extensions which provide advanced editing functions over the standard wysiwyg editor. I've been installing the JCE extension on recent projects because it has a paste button for Microsoft Word which strips out the MS HTML which often causes problems.

You will come to this same window whether you are creating a new artilce or editing an existing article.

Some editing functions you can do from the wysiwyg toolbar:

• Apply Bold, Italic, Underlined and Cross-through formatting
• Change text alignment to left, center, right or justified
• Apply styles, formatting and choose fonts
• Make bullet and numbered lists
• Change indentation (indent/outdent)
• Undo/Redo
• Make a link or break a link to another web page (hyperlink).
• Insert an image
• Insert the date or time
• Insert other media files (mp3, mpeg, etc.).
• Create and work with Tables
• Insert supcripts, superscripts and symbols
• Insert a horizontal rule

Many people write their content in another application, e.g., a text editor or a word processor. If you do this, you can copy the content from the application window where you created the content to the Joomla editing window.

Warning - Some applications, Microsoft Word for one, will end up pasting HTML code that attempts to format your text exactly the way it was in Word. This includes font selection, font size, and the specific bullet symbols applied to any lists you've create. My advice - Don't paste directly from Word.

Why? You will find the content you have pasted from Word does not match the look of the typography on your site. Articles written entirely with the Joomla editor will look quite different. Some formatting you applied in Word will look wrong when pasted and then displayed in your site. The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for your template control the look of the text in you site. But the pasted text attempts to insert HTML codes to override this typography. Not only do you end up with a hodge-podge of typographic styles but often these inserted codes just don't work as expected. Ironically, I've found that text pasted from Microsoft Word often looks better when displayed in FireFox than in Microsoft's Internet Exlorerer.

My suggestion for creating content in another HTML aware application is to first paste the content to a plain text editor such as Notepad or Notepad++. Then select this text and paste it into the Joomla Article editing window. This should strip the formatting from the text. Now apply formatting using the toolbar buttons in Joomla.

If you (or your web designer) has replaced the default WYSIWYG editor with an advanced alternate you may have other options for pasting from Microsoft Word documents. The JCE editor has a “Paste from Word” button on the tool bar that will strip out incompatible code. There is also an “Erase formatting” button that can clean up any unnecessary code that has been added.

Beneath the text editing window are three buttons having special functions. These are buttons labeled Image, Pagebreak & Read more ….

The Image button allows you to insert an image into your text. You can select from images that have previously been uploaded to your website or you can choose an image on your local computer, upload the image and then insert it into the content.

To insert an image that has previously been uploaded to your website, browse to the image and select it. The default directory for images is under joomla directory/images/stories. Once you have selected your image, click on the Insert button (Insert Cancel top right of window). This will insert the image into the current cursor location of the editing window.

The section below the image thumbnails has some options for the images you wish to insert. If you neglect to fill this out now, you can edit these paramters by selecting the image within the editing window and clicking on the toolbar image button. The options here are Image URL, Align, Image Description, Title & Caption checkbox.

If you have selected an image by browsing to it and clicking on the thumbnail, the relative path to the image should be displayed in the Image URL text box (e.g., images/stories/clock.jpg). However, instead of inserting an image from your site, you could insert an image from another web location. In that case, enter the complete URL of the image location in the Image URL box. Make sure you have permission to use images from another website. Please respect the copyrights of the content you use.

The Align drop down allows you to choose left or right alignment. Right alignment will put the image on the right side of the content. Text will fit into the space to the left of the image.

Image Description and Title should be filled out. These are meta tags and are an important aid regarding usability - making your site usable to people with disabilities. These tags also are useful for describing content by search engines (but no longer have much impact in you search engine ranking) and are displayed in text only browsers.

The bottom section allows you to upload images from your local computer to your website. You cannot insert images into your text until they are on your website.

The Pagebreak button inserts a page break at the cursor location. This allows you to break long articles into pages.

The Read more … button also inserts a type of break into your text at the cursor location. What happens when an article with a Read more … break in it is displayed depends on other settings which control how the article is being displayed. One of the options you have is to display an introductory text - a teaser, but not the entire article. This is often done for blog entries but can also be used for something like a news headline. The article display stops where the Read more … entry was inserted and displays a link with the message “Read more …”. A vistor then clicks on the link to read the entire article. The text “Read more …” can be changed.

The top right hand side of the window, adjacent to the left Title section, displays some information about the article. This includes:

• Article ID (the number used to reference the article in the database)
• State (whether the article is published)
• Hits (number of times the artilce has been viewed and a button to reset the counter)
• Revised (number of revisions)
• Created (date)
• Modified (date)

Beneath this status area are the article paramter sections. These are:

• Paramters (Article)
• Parameters (Advanced)
• Metadata Information

The Paramters (Article) section is hopefully easily understood. The sections are:

• Author - This is who wrote the article. It defaults to the username of the person who created the article. But it can be set to the name of any registered user who has permission to create articles.
• Author Alias - If given, an alias will be displayed instead of the user name or real name of the author.
• Access Level - This sets who has permission to read the article. Choose Registered if you want only registered users who have logged into your site to be able to read the article. Otherwise choose Public.
• Created Date - You can set the creation date to a past or future data. It defaults to the date the article was created.
• Start Publishing - Setting the creation date to the future may have confused you in the above item. One reason to do that is because you can delay publication of an article until a future date. Select when you wish the article to be publish from the Start Publishing box. Presuming you have set your menu displays options correctly, the article will not appear until this date.
• Finish Publishing - Of course if you can control when the article is published, you can also control when it will stop being displayed. The default is never - always display the article. But, if you published a seasonal article you could then automatically remove the artilce when the season had passed.