Learn how to create and publish an article in Joomla 1.5 using the Article Manager. The tutorial covers filling in the title, alias, and category fields, using the WYSIWYG editor for formatting, and inserting a Read More break for preview text. Avoid pasting directly from Word to prevent formatting problems.
Hey everybody, today we're going to do some Joomla training. And when you log on, I'm going to send you a username and password and you go to yourwebsite.com/administrator. And this is the page that you're going to see. Today we're going to work on my website. I'm going to show you how to add a new article. So when you get to the login page, yourwebsitename.com/administrator, simply type in your username and password. And this is going to take you to what we refer to as the control panel or the main page of your content management system. You're going to see a few more options here on mine than what you're normally going to see, but that doesn't really matter. All you're going to do is you're going to click on the button that says Add New Article. There's 2 main places here, 3 main places you're going to use. You're going to use Add a New Article, Article Manager, Front Page Manager, and Media Manager. They're all available here from this main page. Now remember that you can cut and paste from Microsoft Word, Notepad, Quark, InDesign. You can cut and paste the text. And just remember, it is the internet, so not everything is perfect all the time. You may need to go through and reformat just a little bit. Okay, this is the Article Manager page, and this is where you're going to insert a new article. You notice up here in this box where it says Title? This is simply what you're going to title your article. So I'm just going to call this article Ryan Test Article. The aliases you can leave blank. What's going to happen is Joomla is going to go ahead and create an alias for you that's going to be easy for search engines to read. Over here on the right, do you want to publish it or not? Just in case maybe right now you're just creating a draft, you don't need to publish it. In this case, I'm going to go ahead and say yes, go ahead and publish it. Do we want it to appear on the front page? That's the next little box here, and in this particular case, I'm going to say no. So it allows you to be able to choose which articles you want on the front page, which articles you don't. And here's your section and your category, so this is where you're going to choose is I'm going to place this one in the section called News, and I only have 2 categories, Latest or News Flash. So this allows you just to keep your articles organized. Now you'll notice here in your editor, it looks just like a word processor. You've got bold, italics, underline, strikeout, left, center, and we're going to go through just some of these today. So this is the area right here where you would type the content of your article in this area, or you can cut and paste it. Keep in mind, sometimes when you're cutting and pasting from Microsoft Word, it's going to create a little bit different formatting issues for you because Word is going to place some things in the background, so you need to make sure that you're aware of that. So this is where you're going to type your content in this area. Now, if you've got several things that you're going to type in this area, okay, I'm going to take just some make-believe content and place it here in in where I place my articles. I want to show you is if you notice here on my website, it's going to show a teaser paragraph. This is sort of going to be our teaser paragraph, and then there's a button that says Read More. So what we're going to do over in the article area is wherever I want that Read More to appear, I'm going to place my cursor and I'm going to click down here at the bottom where it says Read More. Now there's a lot more complexities to the article manager, but we're just going to cover the basics. So I've cut and pasted my article here into the article area. I've placed the red dotted line where I want the read more to appear by clicking read more down at the bottom, and that's basically it. Now if I wanted to make something bold, I'd simply select the text and choose the bold button. If I wanted to underline something, I'd simply choose the text and I would click underline, and it's as simple as that. Now in future training, we're going to go over inserting images and things like that, but right now we just want to cover the basics. Okay, and so that's about it. All we're going to do is we're going to click Save, and that's the end of adding an article to our database.
