Chapter 2. Creating, Editing, and Organizing Content

The content of a website is what drives users to visit it in the first instance and keeping them coming back is the key to a successful website. Content should be written for its intended audience and delivered in a well presented and easy-to-read layout. Writing and presenting content for the Web is different from writing for printed material, and this chapter addresses a number of ways content editors can do this successfully. The Wired magazines website (http://www.wired.com/) recently won a "Webby Award" for the exceptional quality of its editing/copyediting. If you want to know more about The Webby Awards, take a look at their Wikipedia page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webby_Awards. They award exceptional websites within categories.

Articles are an important part of the Joomla! website framework as they present the various items of news and information a user seeks. They contain text and multimedia like images, videos, and audio files and updating them is a relatively simple process.

The article editing application within Joomla!'s administration framework is a simple text editing application referred to as a WYSIWYG editor. Basically, What You See Is What You Get because the editor shows content creators how the new material will look as it is being developed.

The Article Manager provides the central point of access to managing the articles, the presentation of which can be filtered to show only articles of a certain nature, such as published articles.

Articles can be created from the front or backend of a site, depending on the user group the creator belongs to. Authors are allowed to create and edit their own Articles from the frontend of the site and must log in to do so. Refer to Chapter 5, User Management for more information on user groups.

Other users are given access to the backend and will be registered as a Manager, Administrator, or the Super Administrator. The role of a Manager or an Administrator is assumed for the purpose of creating and editing content as the website owner and content editor.

In this chapter we'll look at: