Adding new Content

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Add new content to the pages on your site will most likely involve adding a new content article.

See exceptions

Open New content Article:

1. Click on the ‘new’ button located at the top right of the Article Manager screen.

You can alternatively click on Add New Article from the control panel.

This will open the WYSIWYG editor.

Add your content:

2. In the title field, enter a meaningful title.

Depending on your settings, this is likely to show up as a page title, so give your article a title that tells readers what the contents of the article is.

Joomla! will automatically fill in the Alias field based on the article title you just entered, although you can enter one yourself if you want to.

3. Select the Section in which it belongs.

If you do not want to assign it to a specific Section, you can select ‘uncategorised’, but use this as a last resort as it may not show up in the correct place on your site.

4. Published will default to yes.

Check no if you want to work on the article but publish it later (if you don’t think you’ll be ready).

5. Front page will default to ‘no’.  Only change it if this piece of content is intended to be displayed on the front page of your site.

6. Select the Category

You will only be able to select the Categories for the Section you selected in step 3.

7. Enter the text related to the article

Important Note: DO NOT copy and paste text directly from an email or other word processing applications.

If you are coping the content from elsewhere, click on the Paste as Plain Text option from the Paste icon.

8. Type or paste your text.   Make sure any text is using the paragraph style (you can see this in the format drop down).

At this point you may want to refer to the individual guides for:

• Using Content Templates
• Formatting text, images and headings'
• Adding images
• Adding Links
• Adding links to documents such as PDFs
• Adding Read More breaks
• and Page Breaks
• Editor icons in detail

Set Your Parameters:

Next you can set different parameters for this content article.   Some of these are set at the Global level – i.e. set for the whole site, so only adjust parameters if needed for you particular site or you know what you're doing!

Read more about Article parameters if you want in-depth explanations, the key things are covered here:

9. Parameters (Article):

• Author Alias - you may want to put your proper name rather than your user login name
• Start Publishing - Defaults to today's date
• Finish Publishing - defaults to never.  Only put an end date on content you want to 'disappear' from your site on a specified date.
• Access level - select who you want to see the article. If you do not have a members area, leave this to Public
• Ordering - a new article will automatically be put in the first position (ie top of the list). If you want to change the order articles appear, see the guide on how to Edit Article Order.

10. Parameters (Advanced)

Generally use the global setting unless particularly required for your site.

11. Metadata Information

Enter a brief (less than 160 characters) description for the content article.  This description will show in the search engine result pages (along with the article title).

12. Click on Save – this is the equivalent of save-and-close.

The Apply button is the equivalent of save-without-closing.

13. If you want, you can preview the page.

TIP: Change the ‘published’ radio button to ‘No’ while you are editing your article. Once you are happy with how it looks, change published to ‘yes’

Exceptions

Note all content is held in an article.  Exceptions to this will depend on your site but content can also be contained in:

• Modules
• Banners
• Product catelogues (eg in Virtuemart)
• Image galleries

These are covered seperately.