How to create an article in Joomla from the front-end

One of the most important things that you will do in your Joomla powered website is add new content and thanks to Joomla this process is made extremely simple. Joomla adds content in the form of articles and displays it in the correct category for you so you don't have to worry about it. In this tutorial we will learn how to create a Joomla Article from the front end.

To begin writing your article find the login form on your website and enter your user name and password. Once you have logged into your website a second menu list will appear called the user menu.

Joomla Login

This menu has additional options depending on your user setting. For the sake of this article we will assume that you have the ability to author content for your site. Therefore you will want to click on the link in the user menu "submit an article"

Once you click on this link you will be taken to a new screen entitled "Submit an Article”. A screen shot of this page is shown below.

Submit a Joomla Article - front end

Click on the box to the right of the title section and enter a title for your article. For better rankings in search engines make sure your title includes specific keywords about your article. At the same time do not put keywords in the title that do not have anything to do with your articles, an example would be the title The best laptops ever” with an attached article about your latest golf game. Obviously the title has nothing to do with the content and search engines will penalize you for such actions.

Most times the best action is to write your article first and then create your title accordingly as more times than not your content varies a little bit from what you originally planned. This also gives you more time to create a title that will convince readers that they need to read your article.

After you have finished your article and selected an appropriate title you will notice several options below the word processor section. The first of these options is a set of four buttons.

Buttons below a Joomla Article Editor

The image button is used to insert images into your article. Pressing the button will open a pop up window from which you will be able to access or upload images. This feature is also included with most editors.

The page break button, when pressed, will break your article into multiple pages where your cursor is located in the article. This is extremely useful when you have long articles. To insert multiple pages simply place your cursor in each location you would like to create a new page and press the page break button. This process may vary slightly depending on the article editor you are using.

Another option is to insert a read more break. By inserting a read more break the article will only be shown up to the read me break. If a reader wants to view more of the article they will have to press the read me button and then the rest of the article will appear.

The fourth option is to toggle between the text editors that you have installed. By default your Joomla will be installed with TinyMCE and No Text Editor. There are also several other available editor extensions, you can read about them in the editor extensions article.

Next comes the publishing options. In this section you will have to decide which section and category you want your article to appear in by selecting the appropriote drop down menus. You cannot add or change any of the sections or categories from this point that must be done from the admin section of the Joomla website.

Publishing options for Joomla Article

You can also select if you want your article to be published or not. depending on your user permissions you may have to wait for approval before your article goes live on your website. You alos have the option of placing you article on the front page of your website. By default all new articles show up at the top of the pages in which they are inserted. The other option here is to insert an author alias insead of your username.

The next three options allow some flexibility in your publishing. You can in this section choose a start and finish date for a particular post. This allows you to write articles in advance of release dates and pull articles once they are outdated without having to remember to login and do it yourself. The last option is if you would like to make this article available to the public (anyone who comes on your site), registered (anyone who is logged into your site), or special (only available to advanced users such as yourself if you are writing articles for your site) users.

We are almost done with our article creation but we have a couple more important steps left, the description and keywords text boxes.

Write a short description of your article, make sure to keep it simple and use your keywords. Then insert your keywords into the last text box. make sure they are keywords that were used in your article, preferably more than twice.

The last step is saving your article. You will notice at the top of your article to the right of the title box you have the option of saving and canceling your article. press the save button. You will see a note indicating that the article has been saved.

Congratulations on creating your first Joomla article.