Editing Articles Overview
Creating and editing articles can seem overwhemling at first. However, it's not nearly as difficult as you might think. In fact, the system is designed to make updating websites easy. Almost anyone can do it. Chances are, if you've ever edited an article or document with Microsoft Word, Open Office, or other word processing program, you'll already have some clues about how to edit the articles on your webiste.
1. Login to the administrative panel at http://www.your-domain/administrator (where "your-domain" is your url. For examle, if your website is www.mychurch.org, then your administrative panel can be found at www.mychurch.org/administrator.
2. Navigate to the "Article Manager". It can be found in the main menu under "Content". Or you can click the "Article Manager" icon from the control panel (the main screen after login).
3. After clicking the article manager, you'll find a comlete list of articles on your website. Most churches have lots of articles in their system (sometimes hundreds of articles), so its a good practice to narrow down your choices to find what you need. In this example, we'll select the drop-down menu and click "Ministries" to narrow the scope to articles about Ministry. The list will automatically refresh, listing misistry articles in the order they were entered.
4. There's a good chance you'll need to narrow your options further. Thus its a good practice to select the Category drop down box and pick a category to further narrow your scope. In this example, we'll choose "Liturgical Ministries".
5. Now you should see a list of articles about Liturgical Ministries. Select that one that you wish to edit by clicking on it's name. Hint: if you click the word "Title above the list of articles, they will be arranged alphabetically.
6. The "Title" refers to the actual name of your article as it will appear on your website.
7. The "Alias" refers to the name of your article within the url or web address. If you leave this field blank it will be populated automatically the first time you save your article.The complete url contains the domain name, section alias, category alias, and article alias (the section and category alias's were set when they were created with the website). In the example below, the word "cantor" is the article alias, so it gets added to the end of the url (see example below).
8. Select the "Yes" button in the "Published" setting if your article is ready to be seen on your website. Select "No" if you wish to keep the article as a draft.
9. The "Front Page" section allows you to publish the article on the home page of your website, in addition to its place in a section and category. In other words, by selecting "yes," this article will appear inside the section Ministry and category Liturgical Ministry, and it will also appear on the home page of the website. This feature is particularly useful for news, announcements, or other dynamic (changing) content.
10. The icon menu contains all of the word and image editing features for the article. Simply place your mouse over an icon to learn more about what it does. Notice that most of these icons are similar to popular word processing programs. They function very much the same; select text, for example, then click the "italic" icon, and your text will be converted to italics. Look for a separate tutorial on all of these features.
11. The parameters menu determines when the article will be published and under whose name it will appear. The author alias is the name of the person that wrote the article. If left blank, the alias will place your name as the author. This feature is useful if you are publishing articles on behalf of someone else. If you put "Pastor Tom" in the alias field, it will appear as if Pastor Tom wrote it (instead of you).
12. The parameter menu also includes important publishing dates, such as the start and finish dates for publication. This feature is very useful for planning special publications or blogs that you wish to appear (or disappear) on specific dates (such as Easter or Christmas).
13. The "Parameters (Advanced)" has more features to help you organize what your users will or will not see. In most cases you will NOT need to change these settings. Look for separate tutorials for advanced users.
14. Don't forget to click "save" when the article is complete.
