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Time for action – creating an intro text
In the arcles you created in earlier chapters, you've already seen it's good to add a separate
intro text to an arcle. Now you know why; if you don't, the arcle can only be displayed
fully on overview pages such as the secon overview you just saw. Let's x things by adding
an intro text to our new arcle.
1. Navigate to Content | Arcle Manager and open the arcle that you just created
(Just What are Ugly Painngs?) to edit it.
2. In the text editor screen, add a new rst line. In this example, we've entered
The Characteriscs of True Ugliness: how do you recognize them?
3. Place the cursor just aer this rst line to indicate that you want Joomla! to split
the arcle here, and create a Read More link to point to the full arcle, click on the
Read More buon at the boom of the editor screen. A red doed line appears:
4. In the Parameters (Advanced) panel, set Intro Text to Hide. This means the
intro text (in this case the short teaser text we just created) will be hidden
when the full arcle is shown. It will be shown on overview pages.
5. Click on Apply and then click on Preview to see the output on the frontend. You'll be
taken to the frontend home page. In the Main Menu, click on the Ugly Painngs link.
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Mission accomplished! Now, only the intro text and Read more link of the new arcle appear
on the secon overview page:
More teaser texts will be added to the overview when you add more arcles to the secon.
The full ve paragraph arcle is shown (without the teaser text) when the visitor clicks on
the Read more link:
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What just happened?
In principle, any arcle in Joomla! can consist of one connuous text. Especially when wring
short arcles (think of blog posts), one lump of text can suce. But in many cases you'll want
to split arcles into an introductory text (a teaser text, in newspaper terms) and the actual
arcle body text, allowing Joomla! to publish the two parts on separate pages.
Creating multi-page articles
Suppose you have a long arcle with several subheadings, each covering various sub-topics
that all have something to do with each other. Somemes, you may nd such an arcle is
too long. It doesn't t the content screen, you don't want the visitor to have to scroll all
that much.
There's a tedious soluon to this. It involves manually spling the arcle by creang several
individual short arcles. But luckily, there's also a quick way out. By adding page breaks in
a single arcle, Joomla! will display this single arcle in the frontend as a series of separate
pages, automacally adding navigaon links and a table of contents.
Time for action – using page breaks to split up an article
Let's say your client doesn't like the one page arcle on ugly painngs. Instead of having one
arcle with several subheadings, they'd rather see some short pages that explain things step
by step. To do this, we'll edit the exisng arcle:
1. Navigate to Content | Arcle Manager and open the Just What is Ugly Art? arcle
to edit it.
2. Select the page break locaons. This is where Joomla! will split the arcle into
separate pages. In this example, we'll replace every subheading by a page break.
Select the rst subheading (Abstract Chaos) and delete it. Now click on the Page
Break buon at the boom of the editor screen. A pop-up screen shows:
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3. In the pop-up screen, enter the Page Title and Table of Contents Alias.
Page Title: Enter a tle for the new page. It will be displayed next
to the arcle tle, separated by a dash:
Just What are Ugly Painngs? – Abstract Chaos.
Table of Contents Alias: This is the link text that will appear in the
Table of Contents of the mul-page arcle. The Alias and the Page
Title can be the same, however, it's best to keep the Alias text as
short as possible.
4. Click on Insert Page Break. The pop-up screen closes and a grey doed
line is inserted to indicate the locaon of the page break.
5. Repeat Steps 2 to 4 for each page break required and save the arcle.
Click on Preview to have a look at the frontend results. In the frontend
Main Menu, click on Ugly Painngs and locate the intro text of the
Just what is Ugly Art? arcle. Click on the Read More link.
Now, instead of one arcle Joomla! has created a series of interlinked arcle pages. The
rst page the visitor sees is the rst (sub) page. Pages include << Prev – Next >> links to the
previous and next page; the Table of Content's Aliases you've entered when creang page
breaks now show up as hyperlinks in the Arcle Index (a table of contents featured on every
sub page):
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What just happened?
Joomla! lets you add page breaks to spread the content of a single arcle over mulple
pages. To allow the visitor to move back and forth, a Table of Contents secon and
Previous and Next navigaon is automacally added to mul-page arcles.
Use it wisely
Working with page breaks gives you an extra level of content below the arcle level. You
shouldn't, however, overuse this feature. Usually, visitors don't like clicking mulple links
to read an arcle. It's best to reserve mul-page navigaon for arcles that easily break
into logical chunks, such as step-by-step tutorials or porolio pages showing dierent
clients and projects.
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Alternave page display techniques: Tabs and accordions
There are many creave ways to put a lot of content on a single page,
without displaying it all simultaneously. One of these is using tabs. Inially
the visitor only sees the contents of the rst tab panel. When they click on
another tab, the corresponding content panel becomes visible instead.
Another commonly used trick is called the accordion. This allows you to
provide mulple content panels and display them one at a me. Panels slide
out and slide in on a mouse click.
You can create both tabbed pages and accordions using Joomla! extensions.
In Chapter 10 you'll learn how to install and apply them.
Tweaking the details: Changing article settings
When eding an arcle, you can set a wide array of parameters. These allow you to control
exactly which arcle details are shown, when the arcle will be published, and so on. It's a
good idea to explore the opons to make sure what combinaon of seng ts your needs
best. The following is an overview of the sengs you can choose per arcle:
Parameters (Article)
Author, Author Alias The default Author name is Administrator. If you want another
name to appear with the arcle, you can enter an Alias. This name
will appear as the author name (provided that the Author name is
set to show in the Parameters (Advanced)).
Access Level This seng is important if you want to control if pages are accessible
only to registered visitors. See Chapter 9 on user management.
Created Date Change this value to manipulate the Created Date that Joomla!
can display with any arcle. By changing the date, you can bring
an exisng arcle to the aenon of the visitor because it will
reappear in pages with new items.
Start Publishing, Finish
Publishing
Somemes, you'll have prepared content that should only
be published for a given period of me; think of a temporary
promoon, or a special New Years message. Use Start Publishing to
enter the date when the new page should appear on the site; set a
date in the Finish Publishing box to automacally unpublish content
aer a certain period.
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Parameters (Advanced)
Show Title, Intro Text,
Secon Name, Category
Title, Arcle Rang, Author
Name, Created Date and
Time, Modied Date and
Time, PDF Icon, Print Icon,
E-mail Icon
These Parameters control which details should be displayed with
the arcle (either in Blog Layout view or in full arcle view), as
shown in the following screenshot.
In the example below, all extras are set to show. This results in a
lot of "arcle cluer"; it's hard to nd the real content in this detail
overkill. It's best to only display one or two details – if they add
useful informaon.
Seng Arcle Rang to Show will display a ve point scale below
the arcle tle when the full arcle is shown; visitors can rate the
arcle:
Title Linkable (Secon Title
Linkable, Category Title
Linkable)
When set to Show, an arcle Title or Secon or Category name
can be linkable; the visitor can click on it to navigate to the
arcle/secon/category.
Content Language, Key
Reference
These advanced opons are only relevant when you have a
mullingual site.
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Alternave Read more: text Entering a Read more text will replace the default Read more link
with something specic to the arcle:
On the frontend, it will be shown as follows:
Filling out the Alternave Read more: text is good for the
ndability of your content. Search engines aach greater
importance to a custom link (Recognizing Ugly Art) than to default
text Read more. It's beer for usability too, as it allows you to
beer guide your visitors towards the arcle content.
Metadata Information
Descripon, Keywords,
Robots, Author
Metadata informaon is used by search engines. You can add an
arcle descripon and keywords to help search engines index your
content. You'll read more on this in Chapter 12.
Seng preferences for all new arcles at once
You'll probably want to set some preferences for all your arcles at once:
whether you want the author name displayed, whether the tle should be a
hyperlink, and so on. To enter these site-wide arcle preferences, navigate to
Content | Arcle Manager and click on the Parameters buon in the toolbar.
Aer you have chosen the appropriate sengs, these will apply to all new
arcles, so it's a good idea to choose these sengs before the bulk of your
site content is created. Of course, you can override these general sengs by
seng specic parameter choices when eding individual arcles.
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Chapter 6
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Archiving articles
Your website is growing and there's a steady stream of new content. Now what can you do
with arcles that are outdated? Of course, you can just unpublish them. That way they're
sll available in the backend, but the site visitor cannot see them anymore.
Another opon is to create an archive. Archived arcles are sll available, but they're no
longer part of the "normal" site contents.
Time for action – creating a news archive
Let's create an archive for some old news pages on the SRUP site:
1. Navigate to Content | Arcle Manager. In the Select Category lter box, select
General News to see only the arcles in that category.
2. Select two news arcles to be archived. In the following example, we've selected
New Ugly Painngs Discovered and Bob Ross Exhibion Announced:
3. Click on the Archive buon in the toolbar. A message appears to conrm both
arcles are archived. The arcle tles have changed to grey and the word
[Archived]
is displayed next to the tle.
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You've created a (ny) news archive now, but there's no way for the visitor to see the
contents. Let's create a link:
4. Navigate to Menus| Main Menu| New. Click on Arcles|ArchivedArcle List.
Enter a Title for the hyperlink: News Archive. Adjust any other sengs you like and
click on Save.
On the frontend, a link to the Archive is shown. The visitor can lter (search) archived arcles
by keyword or publicaon date:
What just happened?
You've created an archive for outdated arcles. The visitor can see an overview of the
archive contents by clicking on the News Archive link in the Main Menu. Although this
archiving system can be useful, there's a catch; archived arcles get a dierent URL. This
is a disadvantage because exisng links from other sites to your now archived contents
will be broken.
You cannot edit archived arcles. If you do want to change the content
of an archived arcle, you have to rst unarchive it (using the Unarchive
buon in the Arcle Manager toolbar) to make it an ordinary arcle. Aer
you've made changes, archive it again.
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