A how to on creating an Articles Site using Joomla

This Article presumes basic knowledge of Joomla. A working installation of Joomla is required.

Let’s say you need – or just want – to create a Site just like Ezinearticles or similar. If you are keen on using a more generic CMS, and not an article-site targeted script, you might think about using Joomla. That is always a good choice. If you tried to use Joomla as it is, with the default Article Management you will soon feel its limitations, There are some flaws that will hinder you to manage your site like a professional Article publishing Webservice.

1. You have to make the users Editors. Regular users (Registered) do not have the right to create Articles. You have to make them manually Editors. This might work for some website concepts, but for most an automation would be welcome.

2. Users Cannot view their submitted content. There is no list of submitted articles.

3. Administrators do not get any notification per email when a new Article was submitted.

4. Users do not get an email notification when their Articles got approved and published

5. Users do not get a message or notification when their Article is NOT approved.

6. Article Submitting interface is confusing and rather complicated for novice users and users not used to Joomla interface. There are some features that are not needed in a regular article based website. For instance the whole mosimage concept is merely a pain for a regular user, since no webmaster in the right mind would allow any user to upload media on their server. Also the whole image embedding concept that Joomla uses is not very intuitive for the first time user.

7. The most annoying part of the whole Article Management process is the approving system of Joomla. By default there is no way to filter the unpublished content or even to have the latest submitted articles first. Imagine you have hundreds of articles already submitted by users and around 10 submitted a day. To find these and to check the contents you have to search after the title or somehow narrow the list.

8. There is no way to have a reject-edit-republish workflow. That means if your user publishes an article that you then reject, there is now mechanism to ensure that the user gets a feedback on his mistakes so he can postedit the article and resubmit it. This is a major flaw in the article concept of any respectable article publishing website.

Looking for overcoming these shortcomings of Joomla we tried to find a set of components that allow you to complete these tasks and use the standard Joomla article Management. We do not tried out core hacks or similar since these are hard to maintain to the latest version of Joomla and also could interfere with other components that are vital for a good Joomla Website (Community Builder, etc)

We looked in several resources in the hope to find an integrated solution for our problems. We could only find scattered components that solve some of the problems, but not in the way we hoped:

JA Submit and Ninja Simple submit

- simplifies the submission process

- allows non-registered submission (not our goal thou) but overcomes the problem with manually making the users Registered.

- Remove some of the confusing errors Joomla throws at the unknowingly user

myContent - Allows users to edit their past submissions - Allows users to unpublish their content - Allows users to submit in any section

Sadly these are the only solutions we found until now. Using those two you can create a fairly simple but effective Article submission Site.

Edit on January 2008: By the courtesy of “the Factory” we could get a hands-on-preview of their latest work that covers exactly this issue – Article Submission Management ( http://www.thefactory.ro/shop/joomla-components-and-modules.html )

What we discovered is an amazingly well made submission system that cover most of our problems described earlier.

The installation of this component went without a problem, just like a normal Component. Then we made a Menu (displayed just for registered users) with some links to the main functionalities of this component. We defined “My Articles”, “Submit new article”, and “ my Resource Box”

An interesting feature the component introduces to our workflow is the “resource box”. This is a small signature box allowing only limited HTML code in it (just Anchor and Breaks - <a> and <br> ). This is an information box regarding the user that will be appended to their submitted articles. This way users save their info and backlinks once and can focus on the Article submission process.

Another neat feature we discovered and that proves to be a very useful for us webmasters that do not want our webpages to turn into a link farm – is the limitation of the number of anchors in an article and separately in the Resource Box. This way we ensure that users will not submit articles with a lot of links in them without having to reject them. They simply cannot submit them.

We were happily surprised also by the html tags limitation possibility, a feature that strips all tags besides the allowed ones. As we discussed with the authors, all <script> tags are automatically striped regardless of your settings. This is a must-have security feature.

In our quest for building our Article submission site we tested the component in several configuration options, but found that the following configuration of this component allowed us to function as we initially wanted: • Intro and Main text required. Intro text without HTML (so we do not get funky fonts or links in our front page)

• Number of links per article : 4

• Number of links per resource Box: 2

• Allowed tags in Article: <a><p><br><b><li><ul><table><div><td><tr><tbody><b><i><strong>

We also allowed users to add Metadata to their Articles. It’s a nice feature that could bring more hits to your pages on some of the keywords.

Since the Component allows administrators to choose if users may delete or unpublish their articles, we choose not to allow that. But this is an individual choice that webmasters must take. For some it could make sense to allow their users more freedom.

Interesting was the whole customization of the email notifications regarding the workflow. We could change the email content for the acceptance notification, reject notification, etc. Also we could disable them if we liked. We left them on since we need to know when users submit content to our site.

Frontend user interface is much, much simpler then the Joomla default one. The user must choose the section and category he wants to publish into, the publishing start date (allowing delayed publication, for users that want to submit articles regarding products that are not yet launched), Title , intro text and main text. Also if you choose you can add the meta information. The resource box is fully editable (so maybe one user might want to change it for some articles) but the saved content appears in it.

I find it very useful that the intro text can be stripped of html tags, since some users submitted introtext with links in it, also some added bold text or funky colors. Like this you do not have to worry, any tag would be stripped and just plain text will appear.

Another interesting feature is the preview provided for the user so he can see his article with the site CSS (and with the stripped tags) so he can imagine how this would look like in the content.

After submitting a test article we eagerly jumped to the Approval system in the backend (administration, components, Articlemanager – Approve articles)

First we noticed that the default filter is on pending articles – good , this makes my lazy administrator heart jump of joy. We clicked on the first pending article and we saw a simplified version of the com_content screen. We could change everything that matters for the article, or delete it (but not recommended) or Reject it (recommended since it allows the user to make corrections so that the article complies to your site)

Also we noticed the default on “Publish on frontpage”. So very useful for the lazy admin that does not want to remember clicking it all the time. This feature can be disabled from configuration thou.

A thing that catches our eyes was the “Go to next pending after this” checkbox. This was so neat since after saving or rejecting the current article it just jumped to the next one pending, and my lazy finger had not to click on the pending list again. This allows admins to quick approve the submitted articles.

We had a look also on the “reject reasons manager” Here you can add shortcuts to common reasons for rejecting articles like “duplicate content” or “adult content” or similar. So when you reject an article with this reason you just have to pick the reason from a combo box and not write each time the reason. Of course you can write any reason you like , but for our comfort we have also this list.

Rejected articles appear to the user with distinctive icon in the list in the frontend also specifying the reject reason in an overlib bubble. Also the user gets an email specifying the problem. Nice

After a long search it seems we finally found our desired component and we can soon start our article site without having to customize a lot of components to work together. Nice work “The Factory Team”! ( http://www.thefactory.ro )

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