Joomla/Adding Content

Adding New Article
Text is the main type of content managed by a CMS like Joomla. Although a CMS may store other content in the form of pictures, report data, static HTML pages, and media, text is the meat and potatoes of most web sites. In this section, you’ll add the text of a simple article to examine how Joomla manages new content. For now, you will post an article directly as the administrator. An administrator can give permissions to registered users to submit articles and other content items for pub- lication. In later chapters, you’ll set up privileges so remote authors can post to the site with final approval before publication reserved for the administrator or designated moderator.

To begin, you’ll need to log in to the Joomla Administrator interface. To access the Administrator page, enter your site URL in the address bar of your web browser, followed by the directory reference to the Administrator folder. Most commonly, you will have a URL that reads something like this:http://www.example.com/administrator/index.php

For the login, enter your username and password. Unless you changed it, your username will be admin and your password will be the random series of letters that you wrote down when you performed the first installation. When the username and password are accepted, you will be presented with the Control Panel of the Adminis- trator interface. The Control Panel contains buttons for the most commonly used functions of the interface.

When Joomla returns the page to you, you should see the article editor, which has a nice What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) interface. To begin a new article, you need to give it a title, select a Section and a Category, and then enter the body text of the con- tent.

Editing Main Menu
The default Joomla installation has four predefined menus: Top Menu (horizontal menu), Main Menu (vertical menu), Other Menu, and User Menu. Top Menu runs horizontally across the top of the page. Main Menu appears on the left side of the screen and shows the most common site options. The third menu, Other Menu, appears at the bottom left of the screen and includes links to external web sites (Joomla Home, OSM Home, etc.). The fourth menu, User Menu, doesn’t appear on the screen until a user has properly logged into the web site. It has links to items such as Your Details and Log-out. To begin editing the menus on the front page, return to the main page using the Site ® Control Panel menu selection. Once at the Control Panel, click the Menu Man- ager icon. You can play around with the options there which are pretty self explanatory.

Removing Modules
Most of the display on a Joomla page occurs in small distinct areas called modules. The poll on the right side of the main screen for example, is the Polls module. The areas titled Latest News and Popular are modules that display the most recent content and the most popular content, respectively. Currently, Latest News and Popular modules are cluttering up our new, streamlined interface. Let’s get rid of them by unpublishing them. Select the Extensions ® Module Manager menu option. This takes you to the Module Manager, where you can scroll down until you reach these two modules in the list. Then click the Publish green check mark in the Publish column, and it will turn into the red “X,” indicating that the item is being unpublished.

There are other options similar to these that you might want to explore in detail. This tutorial can't go through all those rich features in Joomla that has revolutionzed the CMS.