4.2 Writing Joomla Articles

The next two articles will look at the 7 steps for writing and posting Joomla articles.

These SEVEN STEPS for writing and posting a Joomla article are:

First write your article, including all images, as a WORD document.

Second, add and organize your images for your article. This includes making a folder for the article’s images and put this folder in the images folder on your home computer.

Third, make a web version of the article and article images.

Fourth, transfer the images from the web version of your article to the images/article folder – leaving only text on the web version of your article.

Fifth, use the Median Manager OR Extplorer File Manager to create a new images folder on your website and transfer the article images to this folder.

Sixth, open up Article Manager – Edit and copy and paste the text into the Editor workspace.

Seventh, insert the images back into the workspace and change any Parameters you want.

Then save your new article.

After you have written and posted your article, you can go to the Main Menu and create a menu item for the article. (See Site Structure, Create New Menu Item)

Before we begin writing articles, we will first look at how Joomla organizes web pages/articles and then review how to actually write an article in Joomla. If necessary, log back in to the Joomla Demo Website Administrator Control Panel.

In the top menu, go to the CONTENT tab. The Content Tab has 5 options. These are Article Manager, Article Trash, Category Manager, Section Manager and Front Page Manager.

Let’s look at the Front Page Manager Tab first.

Assuming that you asked for the “Default Content” when you downloaded the Joomla program to your website, there will be 5 articles on the Front Page. These articles all contain useful information about Joomla features and processes. If you are new to Joomla, you might want to read all the articles. But eventually, you will just delete most of them by selecting them and clicking remove. This will send them to the Article Trash bin from where they can be permanently deleted. You can also simply un-publish articles and leave them in place for future reading.

Note that the articles are numbered to appear on the page in a certain order. This order can be changed at any time with the green up and down arrows.

Note also that Articles are assigned to certain “categories” which are in turn assigned to certain “sections.” One of the first things you need to do when designing your website is to organize all of you articles into categories and sections. It is okay to have only one category per section, but each page (article) must be assigned to a category and section, even if the article only appears on the front page.

To write a new article, the first thing you need to do is pick a category and a section. We will next look at some of the Articles.

Click on Content > Article Manager.

This displays a list of the first 20 articles. Scroll down to the bottom of the screen and you will see that there are three pages of articles (about 60 in all). Thus, this apparently simple JOOMLA DEMO site is in fact extremely complex as we will shortly see.

Note that only one of the first 20 articles shown on this screen is published on the Front page. You can add other articles to the Front Page or delete this article from the Front page simply by selecting the article and clicking on the appropriate button at the top of the page.

Note that this page also lists the number of hits for each article. The most popular article is Joomla Overview. This article is not on the Front Page, but it should probably be moved to the Front Page.

To edit an article (webpage), simply double click on it.. You can also create new articles (new web pages) simply by clicking on the green NEW button at the top of the page.

First, let’s double click on one of the first articles listed “What’s New in 1.5?” This opens up the Article EDIT screen for this article:

This is a very short article with a READ MORE (red line) in the middle of it. Click on the preview button to see this article under the Popular Module of the Front Page. It is also listed in the Latest News module on the Front Page. Click on either of these to see the webpage for the actual article. You will note that neither of these has the READ MORE icon. However, if the article appeared on the Front Page in addition to its own page, the READ MORE icon would appear and the text below the icon would NOT appear on the Front Page.

Exit out of the Preview mode to get back to the Article (Edit) Screen. Note that you can change what section and category each article is assigned to. You can also choose whether to Publish it or put it on the Front Page.

The Article Editor also includes a text editor, table editor and image modifier. However, I rarely use any of these. Instead, I will build my web pages as Word documents and then copy and paste them into my web pages. It only takes a couple of minutes. However, if you try to transfer too much information at once, it may not transfer. With big complex pages, I add a little at a time by clicking the APPLY button after the article is in and then adding the images and clicking the apply button again.  

The way to add an image to the document is to scroll to the bottom of the screen and click on Image. This will take you to the Image Manager. There are lots of pre-loaded images. All you have to do is click on an image and then click INSERT to insert it into your article.

STEP ONE:Writing Your First Article – Welcome to our website – as a WORD document

The first article you should write and post at the top of your Home page is called the Welcome Article. The title is typically Welcome to Our Website! And explains what your website is all about.

Like all your other articles and web pages, your first article will consist primarily of a combination of text and images. The steps to transferring your article to your website is to first create a Word document of your article.

This Word document will look like the following:

Welcome to our Website!

Introduction Content

Image 1

Main Body Content First Idea

Image 2

Main Body Content Second Idea

Image 3

Main Body Content Third Idea

Image 4

Conclusion

Articles are thus just a combination of carefully structured text with associated images. In the next article, we will review how to add and organize these images in your article.