Joomla! Documentation™

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Manage articles using the Front-end of the Web site

Who is it written for?

Everyone: You need to be logged in with a username with at least Author permissions.

It is useful for people who will administer a site to know that some tasks can be done using the Front-end, so even the experienced should have a go here.

What is the Front-end?

The Front-end of a Joomla! site is the public interface. It is the part seen by any visitor to the site and you have already used it for adding and altering its content. Authors, Editors and Publishers can login to this part of the site, as you have already seen.

• There is a Back-end to a Joomla! site, which is restricted to people with levels of administrator permissions. Here there is management of Articles, Sections, Categories, Menus, Users and much else.
• If you are an Author or Publisher, you do not have access to the Back-end.
• If you are using localhost - you are may be running as the administrator and can use the Back-end. (Cross - references Back-end permissions.)

Front-end content management: What you can do

Some management of content can be done from the Front-end and many Web sites encourage their contributors to do this as it makes the site more interactive and responsive to change.

Add and alter content

There are other documents in this series that show you how to add new articles and how to alter them. (cross-refs) Most Joomla! sites allow this. The alternative is that content is added in the Back-end, thus limiting the types of people who can update the site.

Publish and unpublish content

• Publishers and Editors: When you add a new article, you are able to publish it by ticking Yes in the Publish choice in the editor. (cross reference)
• Authors cannot publish or unpublish their articles

To Unpublish content

To keep a site up-to-date, it is good policy to clear out old content. This is especially applicable to news items or information about events that have past. Unpublishing makes the article invisible to the normal visitor to the web site.

• Publishers and Editors: In edit mode - in the Publishing section:-

Click the No choice for Published

Save the article

You will still be able to see it - but the edit icon is now a different colour and if you pass the mouse pointer over the title - it gives the information that it is Unpublished.

To get it removed entirely - the site administrator has to delete it in the Back-end.

Position Articles in an appropriate place

This too is done in the Publishing part of the editor screen. The detail depends on the design of the web site in use.

• When an article is created, you select a Section and a Category for it (or leave it uncategorised). You can change the selection to a different Section and Category later.

Section: choose from the pull-down list

Category: the choices depend on the Section chosen

Background to Sections and Categories: these are ways of organising content behind the scenes. The important point is that:-

• an Articles is contained in a Category and displayed in the Menus - details of which have been set up by the system administrators in the course of developing the site.
• a Section contains one or more Categories. Each Category can have articles assigned to it. This is what you are doing in the Publishing section of the editing screen.

There are two main reasons why it has been done in this way:-

The Section / Category / Article organisation is separate from the menus, although menus are often created to reflect the Sections and Categories. (cross ref / link to doc on section / categosies.)

Other changes

The editor also allows you to:-

• Schedule an article with dates in Start Publishing and Finish Publishing.
• Access Level: choose the appropriate one for your site.
• Front Page: this is rarely altered to Yes.

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--Lorna Scammell December 2010