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CHAPTER 4 ■ ADDING CONTENT
Click on the New link and the screen should display the WYSIWYG editor you’ve selected as the default. Below the text editor area, you’ll find panels for most of the basic parameters and also an entry space for the article metadata. Enter a sample article and fill out the article parameters as if you were a third-party contributor to the site. Once the article is complete, click the Save button. The article will be submitted into the site. Once a contributor has posted a new article, it is up to the administrator or moderator to decide if it should be published on the site. Log in again as the administrator and open the Article Manager in the Administrator interface. You will see the article that was just submitted into the system. In the Published column is a red X signifying that the article is not presently published. Only the administrator or a user with Editor or Publisher permissions can accept the article for publication on the site.
Conclusion You should now have a pretty solid grasp on publishing content on the Joomla system. In this chapter, you not only performed the preplanning of the site with a third-party application (such as Microsoft Word, FreeMind, or Leo), but also implemented your site plan by creating a structure of sections and categories that could be used to file each article properly. The two editors included with the default Joomla installation (TinyMCE and XStandard Lite) for creating and modifying articles both offer robust features. TinyMCE has an excellent user interface and, being written in JavaScript, will run on nearly any browser. XStandard Lite, with a client component only available on the Windows platform, provides XHTML features as well as superior performance. You should now be able to choose the editor that best fits your needs. You also learned how the basics of the menu system work, so you can create either a direct menu item link to an article or a menu item that presents an entire category. Finally, you created a new registered user and set the permissions needed to allow that user to contribute article content to the Joomla site. In the next chapter, you’ll greatly expand your knowledge of site administration so you can maintain not only the site itself, but also the virtual community of users.