How to Create and Publish Articles           

Login

In your browser, enter the URL http://www.yoursitename.com/admistrator, then login with your assigned username and password. After logging in, you will be in the Administrator’s Control Panel. Anytime you need to return to the control panel, simply click on the menu Site/Control Panel.

Modify Existing Articles

You will see an icon that says “Article”. Click on this to open the Publisher’s Dashboard. Click on “Article Manager” to see the list of all articles. Single-click on any article to open it for edit.

Note that you may sort the list of articles by clicking on any column heading in bold. Also, you may winnow articles from your list by using the filters at the upper right, just above the listing (“Select Section”, “Select Category”, “Select Author”, “Select State”.

Helpful Short-cuts

On the Article Manager screen (the one that lists all the articles) there are three helpful short-cuts, which you’ll see in their respective columns:

• Publish: Simply clicking on the icon causes the article to become published or un-published (appear on the public website)
• Front Page: Clicking on this will cause the article to appear on the Front Page of the website
• Order: Note that “Order” refers to the article’s order within its Section and Category. If you want to move it up or down a couple notches, simply click the green up and down arrows. If you want to re-order an entire page (“blog”) of articles, then enter the rank numbers and click the disk icon at the top of the column to re-rank the articles.

In addition, note that you can use the selection boxes in the far left column to select a group of articles to which you can apply the functions in the top icon menu (archive, publish, move, etc.)

Save and Exit

Within Joomla content management, there are only four functions, represented by buttons, that are allowed:

• Preview ((Screen Icon): Clicking this displays a more accurate WYSIWYG web representation of what your article will look like.
• Save (Disk Icon): Clicking this will save the article’s changes and exit back to the Article Manager.
• Apply (Green Checkmark): Clicking this will save the article’s changes and stay in the article.
• Close (Red “X” Icon): Clicking this closes the article without saving any changes, and exits back to the Article Manager.

Warning: Remember to always avoid hitting any browser navigation buttons while using Content Management Systems. Always use the function buttons, because these are NOT web pages, they are records in a database. Exiting an article by using the browser navigation often causes the database record to lock up. If this happens, contact the system administrator to unlock the record.

Write New Articles

To create a new article, click on the green circle with embedded white “+” icon, located in the top right icon menu. Then follow the same instructions for editing an existing article. Alternatively, if you are in the Publisher’s Dashboard, you will see an icon representing “New Article”. Clicking on this will accomplish the same effect.

Edit Styles

The style editor for text that you wish to modify within the article is selected by clicking on the “Double-A” icon at the far lower right of the icon menu in the WYSIWYG editor. A dialog will open that allows you to perform a number of advanced operations on the selected text, such as size, color, background, etc.

Note that super- and sub-scripting is not in the Style Editor, but is accomplished by selecting the text desired and simply pressing the superscript or subscript buttons (the small “x” buttons on the third row) in the WYSIWYG editor.

Add Images

Within your article, first click on the position where you want the image to be inserted. To add an image, select the “Image” button at the bottom of the article, which will open the image selection editor. Click the “Browse” button, which will  open a window to browse your local drives. From here on, it works just like your Windows browser. Once you have the image you want, choose which directory to put it in (the AC Grace folder under the “Stories” folder), then press “Upload”, and it will upload your photo. When  it has successfully uploaded, click the “Insert” button at the top right of the Image window, and your image will be inserted at the position you selected.

To wrap text, resize images, and put offsets and borders, click the image icon (the “Tree” button in the middle of the middle row of icons in the WYSIWYG editor), which will bring up a dialog with three tabs of functions. The most important functions are:

• Alignment (Appearance Tab): Selecting an alignment wraps the text appropriately. If you want text to wrap to the right of the image, select “Left” alignment, for example.
• Horizontal and Vertical Space (Appearance Tab): This will put some space around the image for separation from the text.

Add Links

To add a web link to an article, select the text you wish to represent the link title, then click on the “Chain Link” icon in the WYSIWYG editor (middle row of icons, left-middle position), which will bring up the Link dialog. Copy and paste the URL for the linked page into the “Link URL” field, then press the “Insert” button to create the link in the article.

To remove the link, click on the link text within the article, then select the “Broken Chain Link” icon in the WYSIWYG editor (middle row of icons, left-middle position), which will bring up the Un-link dialog, where you can remove the link, leaving the text intact.

Add Attachments

To add an attachment to an article, select the “Attachment” button at the bottom of the article, which will open the article selection editor. Click the “Browse” button, which will  open a window to browse your local drives. From here on, it works just like your Windows browser. Once you have the file you want, press “Upload”, and it will upload your file. When it has successfully uploaded, click the “Insert” button at the top right of the Attachment window, and your file will be attached to the article.

An extensive set of functions to manage these attached articles is provided in the “Components/Attachments” menu area.

Using E-Mail to Notify

Instead of putting your article text in the body of an e-mail or e-newsletter, put a link in the e-mail to the URL of the article on the site, thus encouraging people to use the site for content instead of e-mail. Copy the URL from the address bar in your browser, then click on the “link” button in your e-mail editor, and then paste the URL into the link area and save the link to the body of the e-mail.

Using RSS to Notify

Use the RSS of Joomla to notify subscribers to your site of newly-posted articles. This will automate the process of notification so it won’t be necessary to manually create the e-mail and copy the link.

About Joomla Titles                     

Title Hierarchy

Joomla has the capacity to set titles in five places:

-       Menu item (Page Title – look in Main Menu/menu_item, then System Parameters to turn on/off)

-       Section/Category Title (default set to off)

-       Article Defaults (Article Mgr – click on Parameters in the upper right icons)

-       Article Over-rides (Advanced Parameters within articles)

-       Within the article itself

Lower items in this list over-ride higher items. Each has its own good and bad points, but ultimately, you want the simplest, most automated method to lessen maintenance.

If you have the following requirements, for example, it would introduce some potential conflicts:

-       Standardize Title styles across all content automatically

-       Article lists must display and be titled with the same style as articles themselves

-       Spacing between title and text must be a single line and consistent

-       Article title fonts must be consistent with module title styles

For consistency, set the Article Manager defaults to Article Title = “off”. Thus,

-       Menu item (Page Title): Off

-       Section/Category Title: Off

-       Article Defaults (Article Mgr Parameters): On

-       Article Over-rides (Advanced Parameters within articles): Must explicitly set to “Off” if over-ride needed

-       Within the article itself: Not recommended, unless you wish to have different title types within each article and do not want consistency

Title Aliases

An alias can be assigned to Section, Category, or Article and there is also an Alias for Menu Item. Alias goes with the Name of each of those objects. When you name an Article, for example, you can let Joomla! automatically create the Alias. What Joomla! does is use the same value as the name you entered for the Article, except all of the spaces and special characters are removed and replaced with a dash.

If you change your article title later and want Joomla to re-name your alias, simply delete the Alias field contents before saving, and Joomla will automatically re-create it. If you want to create an Alias different from your article title, enter whatever you like in the field, making sure to use hyphens or underscores instead of spaces.

Those Alias values are used to create URLs (if you activate the SEF URLs in your Global Configuration Utility.)

How the URL is created has to do with the Menu Type you selected. For an Article Layout Menu Type, your URL will be http://example.com/menu-alias.html

When you consider your Alias values, you'll want to be thinking about what you want your URLs to look like. Many who are concerned about SEO try to ensure their URLs have good Search Keywords in them.

So, for example, if you write a blog about "Shetland Sheepdogs", you could make certain the words "Shetland Sheepdogs" is in the Article Title. Then, let Joomla! create the Alias from the Title. The words "shetland-sheepdog" will be in the Alias. If you then create a Menu Item for a Category Blog containing this article, Joomla! will use that Alias in the URL. That will increase the chances your Article will be visible to those searching using a search engine for articles about Shetland Sheepdogs.

If you want to know more about configuring SEF URLs, go to http://docs.joomla.org/Beginners and search for SEF URLs. There's a good configuration guide for URLs on that page. (Plus *everything* on that page is good for learning.)