Website Design in Matlock Derbyshire

Creating an article in Joomla

Before you write your article you need to decide which Section and Category you are going to place your article.

 

If you don't know which Section or Category to use, then you can place it in an Uncategorised section for now.  However, if you are creating a big site its probably best to create some sections and categories for your articles to reside in first.  This will make them easier to find when you come to editing them in the future.

 

If you haven't created a section or category yet then you can read my article on How to create a Section for Joomla here and further to that there is an article on how to create a category here.

Once you have created a section and category successfully you can get on with creating an article.

 

From the Control Panel there are two or even three ways for adding an article.  Firstly the easiest and most obvious is to click on the "Add New Article" button.  However, you may wish to view a list of articles first so you can enter the Article Manager, either by selecting the button in the control panel or from the dropdown menu which appears under Content in the top menu bar.

 

If you enter the Article Manager, you will either see a list of existing articles or if none have been written yet then the list may be empty.

 

If there are articles in the list the article manager should look something like this:

 

To add a new article you need to click on the "New" button.

 

Or, if you have simply clicked on the "Add New Article" in the Contol Panel, then the next screen you will see is the following:

 

So the first thing to do when you get to this screen is to add the title of your article.  You can also add an alias, but if you don't know what to put here Joomla will do this automatically based on your title.

 

You can then select the Section and the Category from the dropdown lists.  If you haven't created a Section or Category then you can select Uncategorised.  Above the Category dropdown list are some radio buttons.  You can either publish your article immediately or leave it unpublished.  And you can select whether you want your article to appear on the front page (or home page) of your site.

 

Below this section you will see a box which at the top has a number of buttons.  These are your buttons for editing your article.  These buttons look like and have similar functionality to Microsoft Word buttons.  So if you are familiar with Word then you should have no problem with understanding what these buttons do.  I'm not going to go into the functionality of each button here, I may save that for another article, if I live that long!

 

So below the buttons you have an empty box.  This box is for the content of your article, whether its text, images, videos or any other kind of media you wish to add to your article.

 

So first of all you may wish to add some text to your article.  Place your cursor in the box by clicking in it and start typing form your keyboard.

 

Adding Images

I will go into preparing images in more detail in a separate article, as preparing images for the internet needs a little bit of forethought.

 

However, if you have some images already to use then to add them you can click on the image button at the bottom of the add content box.  A new box will appear on your screen - looks like this:

 

If you have already uploaded your images either through Joomla's Media Manager or from an ftp connection then you should be able to see your images or if you've place them in a folder, you should be able to see the folder.  Note: the images and folders you see are all within the stories directory in your Joomla Images folder.

 

You can upload your images directly from this screen.  By clicking on Browse you locate the image on your computer and click on "Start Upload".  Your image will appear in the panel with the other images.

 

You can select your image by clicking on it.  The link to the image will automatically appear in the Image URL box.  Under that you can add an Image Description and Title.

 

You can use the Align dropdown list to position your image within your article, and select caption if you want your title to appear below the image.

Other buttons on the article screen

There are two buttons alongside the Image button that are useful when you are editing an article.

 

Pagebreak

If you want to break your article up into pages then simply use the Pagebreak button to insert a new page, Joomla will do the rest.

 

Read More...

If you want your visitors to just read the introduction of your article and then select a read more link to read the rest of the article then click on the read more button where you want the read more link to appear.  Joomla will add the link and when users click on it they will be transferred to the page where the whole article appears.

 

Whats on the right of the Article Screen?

Parameters (Article) - Here you set the name for the author of the article. This will be set automatically as the person you are logged in as, but you can change it to any person who is registered as an Author.

 

You can add the alias for the author if you wish.

 

Set the access level - Public means anyone can read your article, Registered means the user needs to be registered to read the article and Special means only the people designated can read the article.

 

You can set relevant dates for the article.  The Created Date, the date to start publishing and even the date to finish publishing.  Useful if your article is date sensitive.

 

Parameters (Advanced) - by selecting the various dropdown lists next to each element you can select whether you want those particular elements to appear or not.  For instance if you want to hide the title of your article you would choose hide from the dropdown list on the Show Title element. Use Global means the settings which have been set using the Parameters at the top of the Articlle Manager Screen.

 

Metadata Information - adding a description and keywords for your article here will help when search engines in indexing your site.  You should discuss this with your website developer before adding anything here.