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 that you have already used for adding and altering its content. 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.

There is a Back-end interface - which allows the administrator of a site to manage articles, sections, categories, menus, users and configure the site in general. If you are an author or publisher, you do not have access to this, which is intended for those with the higher levels of permission. (link permissions). Back-end permissions.

Front-end content management: What you can do

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.

Publish and unpublish content

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

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 at the bottom of the page:-

Click the button No for Published (third choice down)

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icon is now a different colour and if you pass the mouse pointer over the title - it gives the information that it is Unpublished.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 Publisher part of the editor screen. The detail depends on the design of the web site in use.

When an article is created, you can select a Section and a Category for it. You can also use the editor to assigne the article to a different Section and Category.

The important organisational point is that:-

• Articles are contained in Categories 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:-

1. There are built-in layouts in Joomla! that take advantage of this organization. These make it possible to list articles that belong to Sections or Categories. As new articles are created and assigned to Sections and Categories, they will automatically be placed in these.
2. Sections and Categories also group the articles so that, if there are numerous articles, they can be found by category/section by the administrators.

The Section / Category / Article organisation is separate from the menus, although menus often 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.
• Change the Access level

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--Lorna Scammell December 2010