Definition: The "Article" is the basic building block of your website. If you're used to thinking of web "pages," then think of a page consisting of one Article or many Articles. We organize articles into Categories. It is possible to create a page that contains all the articles from a category, with the latest article appearing at the top. Or a list of articles, sorted as you wish. Pages can also include Modules, which are usually special content like a login form, which may appear on many or all pages.
Let's get started!
In your User Menu, select "Add Article." An editing window appears.
- First, give your article a title.
- Be sure to select the Category the article will belong to. This is important for some of the automatic features that display articles only from certain categories.
- Decide whether this article will appear as a FEATURED article on the Front Page and select "Yes" if it will.
- In PARAMETERS (ARTICLE), type in an author alias if you are entering this article for someone else. Just their name is plenty, but if a title would be handy for readers, include that. If you don't enter anything in this box, your name will appear as the article's Author.
- Choose Access level. Generally this is "Public" unless you are creating content that only logged-in viewers will be able to see.
- Created Date and Start Publishing automatically fill in when you begin this process. If you have time-dated information, like an event, you may choose to FINISH PUBLISHING at a certain time. Clicking the calendar icon at the right will allow you to choose the date from a calendar rather than typing it.
You're ready to start typing! Go to the editing window and begin typing or cut-and-paste text from another document.
We strongly suggest that you wait till you get the text into the article editor before you do your formatting (bold, bullets, etc). Pasting text from Word can add pages of unnecessary coding, and may tangle up your formatting.
Next we'll go over the icons and what they're for.
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Name / Description |
Icon |
|
CMS Content |
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| Toggle Editor Code Editor (HTML, PHP, CSS, Javascript) with syntax highlighting |
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| INSERT > Anchor Creates anchor links within an article (also known as bookmarks) |
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| Bold Makes selected text bold. Shortcut Key - CTRL+B |
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| Bullet List Create a bullet (unordered) list or number (ordered) list |
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| Character Map Open a character map dialog for inserting miscellaneous characters, such as ®, ¢, ñ, ?, ?. |
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| Clipboard: Cut, Copy, Paste Cut, copy and paste text and html with automatic Office cleanup. Includes Paste as Plain Text option. USE THIS IF PASTING FROM Microsoft Word or an e-mail. |
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| Clear Formatting Remove block and style formatting from a selection |
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| Font or background color Set the font color on the text selection |
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| Format Select Format the text selection with the selected block element (see below) |
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| Fullscreen Toggle full-screen edit mode |
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| Horizontal Rule Insert a horizontal rule |
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| Indent Increase or decrease indent |
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| Insert A dropdown menu to insert various media, most of which are already included with icons or in the CMS Content dropdown |
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| Italic Italicises selected text Shortcut Key: CTRL+I |
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| Link/Unlink Add or remove a link from a selection (can be either words or image) |
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| Non-Breaking Insert a non-breaking space |
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| Preview A quick look at the page |
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| Article (Read More / Pagebreak) Create Joomla! Readmore and Pagebreak breaks |
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| Tables Create and edit tables |
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| Text - Align Left, Center or Right Align the text selection or element Not that full justify is not available since it doesn't work well when viewed on small devices. |
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You may be used to working with font style and size in your regular word processing program. In order to keep font selections within the styles that have been set for your website (this keeps it clean and consistent), you will want to work with the FORMAT SELECT feature. You'll see choices such as:
Heading 2
Heading 3
Heading 4
Heading 5
Heading 6
Blockquote: a special style used to set text apart with a pre-determined style.
To Archive an Article
You may want to archive articles that are no longer current. This retains the data so you can find them later. Simply edit the article and change its Status from Published to Archived. Or select Articles from the list and go to Actions > Archive. Or just switch Status to Unpublished to retain the Article in the List for re-use or re-publishing sooner than later.