Ryan Dohrn shows how to create and publish an article in Joomla 1.5, from logging in to the admin panel through saving to the database. He covers the WYSIWYG editor, formatting options, inserting a Read More break, and a tip for pasting from Word without formatting. The Apply button saves without leaving the page; Save writes the article to the database.
In today's training tip, we're going to cover how to add a basic article to your website and subsequently it's going to save it to your database. Remember, you just go to your .com name/administrator and type in your username and password and click login. This is going to bring you to what we refer to as the control panel. Remember, if you ever get lost while you're within your Joomla content management system, simply go to the upper left-hand corner, click on Control Panel, and it's going to take you right back to this page. Now, it's very easy for you to understand when you want to add a new article. You simply go to this button that's here in the upper left-hand corner and simply click Add New Article. Now, it's very self-explanatory, as you'll soon see. The title here is what the title of the article is. Let's just say this is called Test Article for Ryan Dorn. Okay, you'll notice here to the right it says Published. Do you want it published, yes or no? For example, maybe you're on the road and you don't want it to publish yet, you just want to work on it. You would type no. If you want to go ahead and be placed live on the website, click yes. Underneath of that, do you want to appear on the front page? This story, do you want to appear on the front page, yes or no? It's as simple as that. The box underneath your title is an alias. This will be self-assigned by the content management system. This alias is something that Google and other search engines will read, so go ahead and leave it blank. The sections are things that we've predefined for you. In this case, I'm gonna choose a section of News and I'm gonna choose a category of Latest. You'll need to assign sections or give them to us for us to set them up for you. For example, a section might be Cars and a category might be Ford, Chevrolet, Dodge, or a section might be Trucks and the category might be Ford, Chevrolet, Dodge, Or a section, you know, might be training and then a category might be various items within that training section. Okay, alright, down here underneath is your WYSIWYG editor. It's very simple and very straightforward. As you're typing, if you want to bold something, simply click bold, italics, underline, strikeout. If you want to do bullet points, you go here. If you want to do numbered items, you go here. So you simply go to this area and you simply type what it is that you want to appear in your article. I've just chosen some blank web text here. So let me go ahead and do 3 paragraphs. Now you'll notice when you go to most websites there's going to be a teaser paragraph and then it says read more. Well, let's just say for example that this is our teaser paragraph and we want the read more to appear right here after that. All I'm simply going to do is scroll down the page a little bit and there's a button here that says Read More. You'll see this is all pretty straightforward, so I'm going to click that and I'll show you an example of what that means. That's all you do. So you can simply cut and paste from Word, from Excel, from any number of word processing programs. Just remember that Microsoft Word and those type of programs often will remember what Microsoft used to control the fonts. So what I like to do, and a good tip for you, is I like to take things from Microsoft Word, place them in Notepad, and then place them here. Or if you're doing it on a Mac, go from Word into like TextEdit or WordPad and then paste, and that's going to remove the formatting that Microsoft might place in the background. Quite simply, that's it, guys. All you need to do then is click Save. Now, a point of note for you to remember, if you're working on an article for more than 4 or 5 minutes, make sure you click this Apply button up here in the right corner, and that will save your work but will not exit you out of this page. If you want to save it, you simply click Save, and it's going to save it to your database. Down here under Parameters, we're going to get into more of this in detail. You can choose from your various authors that are on your website. You could put in an author alias if you were typing this in for somebody else. You can also go down here under Metadata Information and put in keywords and descriptions which would be great. And one thing I overlooked that's kind of important— if you want to change the color of a font, simply highlight the color, go over here to the little color manager, and choose the color that you want. And if I wanted to make that bold, I'd simply make that bold, etc. If I wanted to go ahead and make this word right here a link, I would just highlight it and then click the link button and then enter in where I want it to link to. And you'll see very quickly that this tool is very self-explanatory and very easy to use. So watch this again and again till you get it. It's as simple as that. This is all about adding articles to your Joomla database.
