Creating new articles

Within the Private Area of this website it is possible for registered users with editorial rights to create new articles in each of the Private Area sections.

Each section, linked in the menu on the left hand side of the screen, lists all existing articles within that category of articles and, in the lower left hand corner of the screen, below these lists, features a link labelled 'New', as shown below:

Clicking on this 'New' text will create a new article within the relevant category and will open the editorial interface, shown below:

The interface shown above is broken into a number of sections:

At the very top of the editing window is a field labelled Title - this is the name of the article, and in all cases (except the homepage) is the text that will appear as the heading to the article. Keep this succinct.

Below the Title field are two buttons, Save and Cancel. Use these buttons to either save any changes that you have made to the document, or to cancel your changes. Always use these buttons rather than the forward and backward buttons within your web browser, otherwise you may lose your changes.

Directly below these buttons is the main editorial interface, which offers functionality similar to standard word-processing packages - this section of the editorial interface is examined in greater detail in a separate help article.

The main editorial interface is followed by a series of fields under the heading Publishing. In general you should not need to alter the contents of any of these fields, but their functions are as follows:

1. Category - assigns the section of the site to which this article belongs. For the ALHOM website the available categories are outlined in greater detail in a separate help article. In most cases, the correct category will have been assigned to the article depending on which section you were in when you created your new article, so you should usually avoid changing this field.

Author's Alias - changes the name of the author of the article. As this will have been assigned automatically by the site, you should not need to enter anything here.

1. Status - this field indicates the current publishing status of the article. Options availablePublished, Unpublished, Archived, andTrashed, and the status of each is fairly self-explanatory - again, in general you shouldn't need to alter the content of this field, unless you wish to remove an article from appearing on the site (by changing its status from Published to Unpublished, for example).
2. Featured - this simple Yes or No field indicates whether the article has 'Featured' status or not - some Joomla sites dynamically generate the contents of their homepage to include only Featured articles. However, this site doesn't utilise this functionality, so you should generally leave this as 'No'.

Start Publishing - if you only want an article to appear on the website from a specific date you can enter the date here and the article will remain unpublished until the specified date, only appearing on the site after the date you have entered here. You can use the pop-up calendar to select the date you wish to start publishing from. This function is particularly useful for News items, but can generally be ignored and shouldn't need altering.

Finish Publishing - in a similar way to the Start Publishing field, it is possible to enter a date in this field to specify when an article should change from being 'Published' to 'Unpublished' and no longer appear on the site. Useful for News and Events articles, competitions or calls for papers, but not generally in use on this site, so can generally be ignored and left empty.

1. Access - this field specifies the level of access required to view the article you are editing, and may be onePublic, Registered, orSpecial. In general this can be left as Public, as access is generally controlled by the section to which the article belongs. However, you may wish to set it to Registered if you want to be certain that it can only be viewed by logged-in members of the website.

Below the Publishing group of fields is a single field for Language. This field is used by websites that are published in multiple languages. In the case of the ALHOM site is can be left as 'All'.

Finally, at the very bottom of the editing screen are two fields relating to Metadata, and these are used primarily for indexing of the articles for website searches, either within the site itself or via Google. On the whole, this is defined at a site level, so you shouldn't need to enter anything here, but you can use these fields is you wish. The two fields are as follows:

Meta Description - a general description of the page content can be entered here, e.g. 'A help article about how to use the editorial elements of the website'.

1. Keywords - simple keywords relating to the article's content, e.g. 'help', 'editing', 'articles'