Global Principles

1. Save, Cancel (in some case Close), and Apply: always remember to click on one of first 3 buttons before leaving ANY article’s (including product) editing page or that particular article will be locked. Although the content of editing pages may vary, this principle applies throughout the entire management of the web site. This design is to prevent 2 people from updating/editing the same content at the same time. The image below is a sample of the editing page.
   1. Preview: to preview the changes you made to this article.
   2. Save: if you are happy with the changes made to an article, click on this button will save and close the current page then take you back to the previous page.
   3. Close or Cancel: click this button to close the editing window without applying the changes.
   4. Apply: if you want to see the changes that you just made but wish to keep working on the same article, click this button to APPLY the changes without closing the current editing window. After applying the changes, refresh or reload your internet browser (ie Internet Explorer, FireFox, and Safari) which is displaying your web site (not the control panel of the web site) to see the changes.
2. Menu: Before adding any menu, the menu needs to be given a destination. A destination can be an Internal Link (meaning content on your own web site) such as an Article, Article Category or Article Section in Blog or List style, or External Link (content orginally on the other web site). There is no limitation on the amount of menus and the levels of sub-menus that can be added. You can move sub-menus to different menu categories or copy menus and sub-menus to different categories. We will look at the details on menu management after the Article Management section.
3. Content Accessibility: Content items are generally guarded by 3 accessibilities, Public, Registered, and Special. Public content items are free to be accessed by every visitor of the web site while Registered items are only viewable for registered users. Special gives a web site user the privilege to write, edit, or publish content items from the web site’s front-end (or the website). You can control these settings with User Manager.

The Article Manager Hierarchy

Section is at the top of this hierarchy. Category follows, and each Article is at the last position. This hierarchy does not represent the importance of the content, but helps you to organize the contents. According to this rule, an article must belongs to a category and a category must be attached to a section. Most of the components follow this logic.

Section Manager

When the web site management system was installed for your web site, there was no content. In the process of developing your web site, we organized your contnet into different Sections, Categories, and Content Item in the most logical way in our opinion, but you might not feel that was the best way. Here is how you can change it.

First, either click the Section Manager icon from the Control Panel main page or go to Content > Section Manager to switch to the Section Manager page. The image on the right displays the Section Manager of a web site. You can see that this web site has only one section so far. The image icon under the title Published represents whether this section is published (live or active).

The other thing that I want to mention on this page is under the title Access Level. You can see currently that the section Sample Section is accessible by every visitor of the web site because it is marked in a green colored word Public. By clicking the word, you will switch the accessibility of this section among Registered, Special, then back to Public again.

To edit the name or description of an existing section, click the name of that section to be brought to the Section: [Edit] page which looks similar to the Article: [Edit] page. Now, let us back track to Section Manager and click the New icon to learn about how to add a new section.

Section: [New] (Also applies to Section: [Edit])

Image: this is not used to add an image to a page, you are only adding an image to all pages under this section. Images showing at this drop-down list can only be found and added under Media Manager > stories. This function is not fundamental.

If you want to have more flexibility with images, use the Description editing field which we will talk about how to use it later.

Image Position: The position of the above image in relations with the description texts.

Access Level: Please refer to the third point of Global Principles.

Published: This will affect all the categories and articles belonging to this section.

Description: Same with Image, the texts that you type in this field will be displayed at the top part of a web page, as long as it belongs to this section. As you can see, the editing tools lying on top of the Description editing field are very similar to the tools that you usually use with any Word Processing software. Put your mouse over each icon and you will see a short description of their functions.

Category Manager

Article Manager

Most part of the Article Manager page works the same with Section and Category Manager. Please refer to previous sections.

Look closely to the icons on top of this page, you should find the one called Parameters. This is used to adjust the universal rules of the content throughout your web site. For example, do you want to show the name of the author (of an article), date of an article was created/edited or do you want to let users rate/vote on your content. In order to use these parameter settings, you need to allow both Javascript and pop-out windows for your website. If you did not allow it before, your internet browser will ask if you want to do so. In that case, approve it.

It is also possible for you to give each individual article an independant parameter setting. The independant setting will overwrite the universal rule for this particular article.

Back to the Article Manager page. There is one handy technique that I want to teach you which also applies to both Section and Category Manager.

You probably already noticed that there are square boxes in front of every section, category, and article. These are check boxes and will apply management actions on multiple items at the same time. These actions are Publish, Unpublish, Move, Copy, and Trash. I will only talk about Move and Copy here since the rest of them are straight forward.

Move is used to move the selected categories and articles to the other section and/or category. Select the items you wish to move then click Move. On the next page, select a destination and save.

Copy is used to duplicate the selected items to another section or category. Check the boxes of the items that you wish to copy, and click Copy. Highlight the destination then click the Save button.

Article: [New] (Also applies to Article: [Edit])

You will see that comparing to Section: [New] and Category: [New], this page has much more options.

Read more: At this point, I want to introduce an important knowledge about: “Intro Text” and “Main Text”.

If you see an area from a web site (or a blog) with a short paragraph and a trailing, clickable “Read More...”, that is an “Intro Text”. On the other hand, the full article which the “Read More...” link take you to, is the “Main Text”. This knowledge is important when you are planning to do the same thing to some of your web pages.

If you wish to apply the latter to this article, finish the “Intro Text” first. The next step is to find a button called: Read More right below the editing field. Click this button once and you will see a red dotted line appeared below your “Intro Text”. This line is where the “Intro Text” ends and “Main Text” starts. Although you will not see it at the Article: [New] page, a “Read more...” link had been created.

Intro Text can be used in 2 different ways. One is to use Intro Text only as a summary to the Main Text, the other is to use it as the first paragraph. The next paragraph teaches you how to set it up.

First, click the arrow beside Parameter (Advanced) on the right to expand it. Find the 3rd option, Intro Text to switch between Hide and Show the Intro Text. This does not mean that you are using the Intro Text. Instead, selecting Show is to use Intro Text as the first paragraph (or the begining few lines) of the full article. On the other hand, by selecting Hide means the Intro Text is only a summary and will not appear with the full article. For example, if I type “ABC” as my Intro Text and wish the full article to be “ABCDEFG”, I will Show “ABC” and only type DEFG in the Main Text area. If I type “English Alphabet” as my Intro Text, I will Hide my Intro Text and type ABCDEFG in my Main Text area.

You can apply this setting to all the articles. Go back to the Article Manager page and use Parameters to do so.

If you are not planning to use this option (having your visitors to click the Read more... link to read the full article), simply ignore the Read more... button.

Pagebreak: If you have a long article and do not want visitors to scroll down, you can insert Pagebreaks to it. Simply put the cursor to where you want the page to break then click the Pagebreak button once.

Insert/Edit Image: Adding images onto articles is probably the second most important thing you want to learn beside text editing. Use either the Image button beside the Pagebreak button or the Insert/Edit Image button on the tool bar (on top of the text editing field). Put the cursor to where youwant the image to appear, and click one of these two icons. A pop-out window will then be opened. Click Browse to open another window which will allow you to select the image from the image folder or upload the image from your local computer. Alternative Text is for people who have problem seeing the image but are able to read a text description of this image. As the rest of this dialogue window is self-explanatory, I suggest you to try and see the effects of the different options. I will only talk about the Link tag. This tag indicates where you want the image to be link to. Input the URL if you know what is it or use the Browse button to find it. The Target drop-down list lets you select how the destination page of this image is going to appear. New Window (_blank) means that the destination page will be opened with a new window. Topmost Window (_top) means that the page will not only be opened in another browse window, but will also be the top one of all other browse windows. The other two selections mean that you want to replace your web site with the new page after this image is clicked.

One other useful editing tool is the Insert/Edit Table tool. Other than creating tables in your articles, this tool is useful in another way. You can easily create a document template and then duplicate the article so every page has the same format. The image below shows a document using tables to create its template.

Now you have learned all the fundamental skills on updating your new uCell Joomla! web site. Start using it and you will agree why we said it is one of the world’s easiest-to-update web sites.