Article editing in Joomla

There are a lot of options, and I’m going to try and cover as many as I can. If I leave some out, it’s probably because I don’t feel they’re really necessary for general work. Please direct questions to NPhillips on the forums.

First off, you should notice the three icons that I mentioned in the Intro document. Use them.

Below that, you’ll have a box with five tabs (some may have four, but that should be incredibly rare): Intro Text, Main Text, Images, Publishing, and Metadata.

Pay close attention to the Intro Text and Publishing tabs.

In this section, you enter the title of your post, as well as the section to post it to.

The Naming convention for .plan files is simply titling the post with the current date.

Please leave this set as “article”. The Blog function is broken (in more than one sense), and I have yet to figure out how to remove it from this drop-down.

Choose Wisely.

At the time of this writing, there is no way to limit authors as to what category they may post in. For the most part, you should only be posting to your respective .plan category.

The text entered into this text box is best described as a blurb, teaser, or abstract for the main body of your post. My suggestion is to keep it short and sweet, giving a quick overview of your post. This is the text that will show up on your .plan page, before the “Read More” link.

If the post itself is a short one, perhaps a paragraph describing something you’ve just done, and where to see it, just put it all in this box.

Here’s where the main body of your post goes. Make it as bulky as you’d like :D

This is probably one of the most convoluted things I’ve ever encountered. I’m working on a better way of including images in posts.

Basically, it allows you to choose images from a pre-selected list (strike one), and the order in which you select them determines where they appear in the document (strike two). To have an image appear, you need to add the tag {mosimage} in your article (strike three). That’s all you see when editing is the {mosimage} tag, which means you cannot resize or truely adjust the orientation (strike four, you’re way the heck out!)

This is a critical tab. It allows you to determine whether or not your post can be seen by others.

• State
  • Unpublished: Your article will not show up, unless someone really digs for it. Only use this if you need to hide your post for some reason. This is the default setting, for some horrible reason.
  • Published: Your article will appear, as normal. Make sure you select this before submitting!
  • Archive: Move your post into the Archives. At this point, no real purpose around here. Wait a year or so ;)
  • Delete: Completely remove your article from public viewing. As far as anyone is concerned, the article is gone. You can come back and restore it, though.
• Access Level
  • Public: Anyone who comes to the site can see your post.
  • Registered: Only registered (and logged in) users can see your post. Handy for staff-only updates and messages.
  • //Special:// Only specific persons, as defined on the admin-side, can see your post.
• Author Alias
  • Not sure why you would want to post under an alias. But, it’s there.
• Ordering
  • Once your article is submitted, you may come back and change it’s ordering. There should be no reason to do this, however.
• Start Publishing
  • If you need to have the article only appear after a certain date, enter that date here.
• End Publishing
  • If you need to have the article removed after a certain date, enter that date here.

This will add information to the main site’s metadata. It helps with search engine recognition. When it comes down to it, you shouldn’t really be adding anything here.