J1.5:Manage articles using the Front-end of Joomla! 1.5

The "J1.5" namespace is an archived namespace. This page contains information for a Joomla! version which is no longer supported. It exists only as a historical reference, it will not be improved and its content may be incomplete and/or contain broken links.

The aim of this document is to outline things that can be done to manage Articles using the Front-end of the Joomla! site. Some important functions can be done here without the permissions to login to the Back-end. It is one of a series of documents introducing Joomla! version 1.5.

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 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.

Manage Articles using the Front-end

Some content management 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. 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. See Get to know the Back-end

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.

The Publisher part of the Editor that allows some management of the Article

• When an article is created, you often 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 is more on this in other documents in this series. See:-

• Background: Sections and Categories
• Background: Menus and Modules

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.

Where Next?

There are documents in this series about the Administrator Back-end of Joomla! web sites. These also have references to comprehensive documentation about Administration.

• Get to know the Back-end
• Starting to manage a Joomla! site

--Lorna Scammell December 2010