Creating an Article

Most of the things we do in Joomla happen within an article. In an article you can have pictures, tables and links. Usually articles are published in the main Content area like the tutorial you are reading, but it is also possible to publish an article in another position in Joomla.

Arno form www.dfmalherbe.co.za used articles to create pictures and links on the right side of his screen.

Ingrid from www.ingridmarais.co.za also affectively used an article on the right hand side showing her recent weddings.

How to do this is beyond the scope of this tutorial but I will cover this in a later tutorial.

Step 1

Step 2

A few this that is important.  Arrow 1 to 4 shows a few filter options you can implement on the Article Manager to get to a specific article quickly.

• Arrow 1 – A filter where you can type the any part of an article title and press go. This will show you all the articles that have the letters you typed in your article. Reset will clear the filter.

• Arrow2 – Select Section is where you can choose a section and view the articles with in that section.

• Arrow3 – Select Category is where you can choose a category and view the articles in that category.

• Arrow 4- Tells the Article Manager how many articles it should show in the list at one time.

To create a new article click on New shown by arrow 5:

Step 3

Step 4

• Give your article a title: Test Article

• The Alias will be filled in automatically, but you could also copy and paste the title into the alias text box.

• Select dropdown box by the section and choose Uncategorised. For the scope of this tutorial we are not going to use a Section and Category yet. Joomla will automatically choose Uncategorised as a category for you.

• You can also select the front page option if you like.

Step 5

• You can change the author of your article.

• Access Level – This could be set to "registered" –only uses that have logged into the front end of you site will have access to the article.

• The Start Publishing and Finish Publishing options are very useful if you are writing about an event that will happen. The System will automatically not display the article outside these parameters. Having an article of a concert or special to be held on Saturday looks really bad if the Saturday mentioned is in the past.

Step 6

Step 7

Step 8

Type something in the article’s editor as shown below.  As you can see the JCE editor we load with your site has a great number of options. Some of the older sites might still have an older editor. Please contact us, so that we could sort this out for you.

Step 9

Finally note the Save, Apply and Cancel buttons at the top right of the article editor:

• Save – Will save and close the article for you.

• Apply – Will save the article without closing it. If you use multiple Tabs like shown in the Using Tabs tutorial, this will save you a lot of time while you are still busy with an article. Please note that Joomla will automatically close your session after 10 minutes. So please save or apply your article before doing something else.

• Cancel – or Close will close the article without making any changes to it.