Documentation for the Joomla 1.6/1.7/2.5 CMS

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Edit an Article in Joomla 1.6/1.7/2.5

To change content on a website using the Joomla CMS system is quite simple.

Log into the admin section of the site (http://www.yourdomain.com/administrator) **You will need you username and password which should be provided to you by your administrator

Once you are logged in, you will be at the Admin Home page also called the "Control Panel".

To edit an existing article:

To edit an article you can either:

1. Click on the icon "Article Manager"
2. Hover over the content menu at the top of the page and select "Article Manager

This will bring you to the Article Manager

The Article Manager

The article manager is where you can edit, search for, sort and otherwise manage your articles in the Joomla CMS.

Some of the features for the Article Manager:

1. Click on any one of the column headers to sort by that column.
2. To change the order the articles appear (assuming your menu item is configured correctly) click on the "Ordering" header, and you will be shown small blue arrows which will allow you to change the order of articles within their categories
3. There is a "search" or "filter" text box right above the column headers which allows you to filter for a particular keyword in an article headline or alias
4. Drop-down menus on the right side above the column headers allow you to sort by different criteria, such as category, author etc.
5. To edit an article, click on the "Title" for that article.
6. To immediately remove an article from the site, or put it on the site, click on the icon in the "status" column for that article.
7. To immediately put an article onto or take the article off of the home page, click the icon in the "Featured" column for that article
8. Similarly, you can check the checkbox on the far left for a given article and choose "Edit", "Publish" or "Unpublish" in the Control Toolbar - right above the dropdown lists on the top-right of the page. More about the Control Toolbar below.

The Control Toolbar

The Control Toolbar gives you a different way to do most things you can already do to each individual article.

The Control Toolbar consists of ten buttons in this version of Joomla:

1. The "New" button: Allows you to create a new article.
2. The "Edit" button: When combined with an article's checkbox, will take you to the Article Edit page
3. The "Publish" button: When combined with an article's checkbox, will immediately publish an article to the site.
4. The "Unpublish" button: When combined with an article's checkbox, will immediately remove an article from the site.
5. The "Featured" button: When combined with an article's checkbox, will add an article to the home page or featured page.
6. The "Checkin" button: When combined with an article's checkbox, will allow others to edit an article which someone else may have left checked out.
7. The "Trash" button: When combined with an article's checkbox, will delete a specific article. You can still, however retrieve the article from the trash if needed.
8. The "Options" button: Allows you to set global options for article display and behavior. Consult with your administrator before making changes here.
9. The "Help" button: Directs to you (typically) online help for the Joomla CMS.

Editing an Article

Lets move on. To edit an article, click on the title for that article. This will bring you to the "Article Edit" page in the Joomla CMS.
This should look fairly similar to the Article Add Screen described here.

From here you can:

1. Change the Title of your Article, along with the Alias - however be careful when changing the alias, as Joomla uses this to make Search-engine-friendly (SEF) URL's, so changing it could impact your SEO for this given page.
2. Change the Category this article belongs to.
3. Change the article's Status - make it online or offline
4. You can alter the Permissions of the article, which will determine who can or cannot see the article
5. Denote whether this article is Featured
6. Most importantly, you can change the Article Text or the content of the article itself. To do this, simply type in the Article Text area, where you see the basic inline editor.
   1. To make a minor change or write more content you just need to type.
   2. If you have a more complex changes to make, you can edit the HTML directly by clicking the "html" icon (it actually says "html") in the editor. This opens a new window to display the HTML code for this article, so make sure you don't have any popup blockers turned on that might keep the new window from opening.
   3. From within the editor, you can also add an image, or a link, format text etc. Explore here a little. If you mouse-over each icon it will tell you what it does.
7. Right below the Article Text box, you will see a row of larger buttons:

8. Article button: Allows you to insert a link to another article
9. Image button: Allows you to upload and insert an image - This is better than the functionality in the inline editor for adding an image
10. Page Break button: Inserts a page-break into the article.
11. Read More button: Inserts a read-more
12. Toggle Editor button: Turns on or off the inline editor.

The Publishing Options, Article Options and Meta Options are the same as when you created the article.

After you have made all of the changes you would like to make, click on one of the buttons in the "Save Toolbar" in the top right corner of the screen.

The "Save" button will save your changes, but keep you on the same page.

The "Save & Close" button will save your changes and direct you to the Article Manager screen.

The "Save & New" button will save your changes and create a new article for you.

The "Save as Copy" button will save this version of the article as a copy, leaving the original unchanged. This is good if you need to keep versions of an article

The "Cancel" button will disregard your changes and direct you to the Article Manager screen.