The Article Editor Page Jul 28th, 2015   [viewed 2183 times]

This is where the magic really happens! The embedded editor is TinyMCE. They have lots of resources at their site for end users like you. Also, please pass along any helpful information you discover in the comments section below.

Free-Blog Articles in a Nutshell

Posting an article really is 1-2-3!

  1. Compose.
  2. Save.
  3. Publish!

An article is only public when it's published, so spend as much time as you like editing, and save the article as often as you like.

Title / URL

As you type a title, a url for the article will be auto-generated. This can be altered to any value you like, but will be converted to lowercase letters and dashes. If you have an article with an empty URL field published, it will be displayed when someone visits your site - a landing page, like Welcome to Freedom! on this blog. If you have multiple published articles with an empty url, the first one created will be used. So, let's say you own a restaurant. When people visit your site, you'd like to have a landing page that talks about how great the food, service and prices are. Then you want a menu page - use a url for that "article", but attach it (and no other articles) to a menu item called 'Menu' (more on that in Menu Items below). Then maybe you create a Menu Item called 'News' or 'Deals' (or both) and attach other articles to those, which will show in a list.

Comments

It's your option to include a comments section or not, on an article-to-article basis. When creating an article (clicking "New Article" in the Articles list), your blog's Comments setting will be "locked in" for that article. This is so that discussions don't simply vanish because of a blog-level change.

Article Images

This area of the page provides for image uploads (images only) that can then be dragged and dropped into the article or copied and pasted. TinyMCE has some nice image tools to work with, so you'll be able to make the article look how you want.

Menu Items

This is where you hook your article to a category (menu item) and create new ones. If you add a menu item and attach only one article to it, clicking that menu item will go straight to the article instead of to a list view (the default, when more than one article are attached). If a menu item has no articles attached to it, it will not appear in your blog's menu. So no need to ever delete a menu item - just pull up any article attached to it and de-select that menu item for the article. Articles can also be attached to more than one menu item, so they function like 'tags' rather than 'folders'.

Next to each menu item is a button with an up-arrow (ok, it's really a carat, but you get the idea...). The button will move an item up in the list.

The last thing to keep in mind is that if you select the menu-right-justified site style (on the Blog Settings Page), the top item on the list will be farthest right, so you'll want to set the order right-to-left.