Ryan Dohrn shows how to create a Joomla article: pick a section and category, write a keyword-rich title, paste content as plain text to avoid Word formatting junk, and use the Read More break to control what shows on list pages.
Hey everybody, today we're going to talk about how to add an article within the Joomla interface. It's actually quite easy to do. One of the things to remember, and this is right now we're in 1.5 and it's very similar in 1.7, 1.6. What you're going to do is actually going to go to the content. I like to start with the article manager. One of the things to remember is I really always like to make sure that I have good sections and I have good categories. It's very simple. All you're going to do in the article manager is simply click new. Then at this point what you want to do is you want to make sure that you give your article a really good title. Remember something, the title is often going to be appearing in the metadata and it's going to appear in the title tag at the top of your page. It's also the main thing that actually Google is going to grab and read. So it's important that the title is not clever. Make sure that the title does contain some of your key phrases. Now you want to pick the section and the category that you want this article to go into. If you don't know how to create sections and categories, there is another video on that. Typically the most common way is people are actually going to go and they're simply going to just grab some text and they're actually just going to place that text within the particular page. What they're going to do is just go and type the text here. Now remember something, that when you're on a Joomla website and you don't want the entire article to appear, you can simply choose to place a Read More break here. Where you do that is very easily right here, Read More. You'll notice it's gonna put in a red dashed line. Okay, now we have another video on adding images, so right now we're just gonna talk about adding text. Now, what you just saw a second ago was some text, and there's a lot of different ways. You can also see that there's ways to copy text in here from plain text and also paste in text from Microsoft Word. Now, Okay, so here I am in a Word file and I'm simply just going to hit Ctrl or Cmd+A to highlight everything and hit Ctrl or Cmd+C. Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to go back over to my Joomla page. You're going to notice if I cut and paste it just by Ctrl+C, paste or whatever, then a lot of times it's going to grab a lot of junk from the actual Word file. So you notice you've got all this gobbledygook at the top. Instead, what you might want to do is use the actual— this Paste from Word. That's going to allow you then to go in here, put in your content. You notice it does have some of the stuff, the gobbledygook, okay? You can clean it up a little bit and then click Insert, and it should put it in here without a lot of formatting issues, okay? And so, that's one of the things. The other things I often do is actually use a plain text editor like Notepad or just basic text if you're on a Mac. And the reason I like to do that is because I quite honestly, you know, I want to make sure that the formatting stays the same. Now, if you want to bold something, you simply highlight it and choose bold. If you want to italicize something, you know, hit italicize. Now, a lot of you are going to say, hey, wait a minute, Ryan, I don't see all of these things here. I only see a couple of things. Now, the reason for that is actually pretty simple. Let's cancel out of this and let's actually go into our plugin manager. So, here's our plugin manager, okay? And what you want to do is you want to look under content, You want to find the TinyMCE editor or whichever editor it is that you are using. You will notice that up here I have functionality chosen extended. A lot of you are on simple. You want to choose functionality extended and then that is going to give you back the editing capabilities that you need. Now, if you are in a position where you are on the article manager and you don't see sections or categories that are listed here like they are on this site, then you are going to need to add sections and categories. And that's actually another tutorial. So keep in mind, you just want to go to the Article Manager. You can see the articles you've created. If you want to add them to the front page, you can simply choose here by adding, clicking, and turning the red circle into a green checkmark. If you want to be a little more specific in what you see here, you can actually just choose which section to be shown here. You can also filter based on terms in the title. And remember something, if you come back here, you have to choose the top option if you want to bring everything else back up. Okay, Joomla is awesome, Joomla is great, and I wish you all the very best of luck. And if you're using 1.7, it's going to be very similar to this as well. Take care and good luck. I'm Ryan from BrainSwirl Media. Thanks so much for checking us out. Bye-bye.
