Guidelines for Submitting Articles
Last Updated on Monday, 18 January 2010 19:35 Monday, 18 January 2010 14:25
Adhering to the following guidelines will make the site easier to run and make the pages load faster:
Submitting Articles from the Homepage (Front End)
Note. If you want to submit an article or news item to this website, you must first register to ceate a website account and then contact the site administrators telling them that you would like to be a site contributor. The purpose of the Joomla! software that powers this site is to facilitate collaboration between a whole team of site contributors.
- To submit an article, go to the homepage and login. A new User Menu appears. Click on the Submit an Article link.
An article submission form appears. Write, or cut and paste, your article and then fill in all the rest of the form fields. When finished, click on Save and your article should appear in the New Articles listing on the homepage or as a front page article if you have selected this.
- It is generally a good idea for long articles intended for the front page to begin submissions with a paragraph of text summarising the content of the item. Think of it as an intro. Then use the Read More button located at the bottom of the article submission form to separate the intro from the main body of the article. Readers will only see the intro on the front page until they click on the "read more" link.
- Articles cannot be saved unless you choose a section and category. Pick the most appropriate one from the drop down menu. Otherwise your article will be classified as uncategorised and may not appear on the site. Complete the metadata form fields (see more about this below). The name you gave when you registered with the site will appear automatically in the published article. If you want to use a different pseudonymn, put it in the Author Alias field.
- Choose a start and end date which will determine the period of time when the article will be published. For example, if your item is publicising an event, choose the day after the date of the event as th e end date and it will be automatically unpublished on that date. When finished, click Save.
Submitting Articles from the Website Back-End (for website administrators only).
- Login to the website Administrative Back-End. Click on Article Manager and then New.
- Give the article a title. Ignore the alias form field--this will br generated automatically. Write, or cut and paste, the article.
- It is generally a good idea, especially for articles intended for the front page, to begin articles with a paragraph of text summarising its contents. Think of it as an intro. Then use the Read More button located at the bottom of the browser-based web editor to separate the intro from the main body of the article. Readers will then only see the intro until they click on the "read more" link in the published article.
- Articles cannot be saved unless you choose a section and category. Pick the most appropriate one from the drop down menu. Otherwise your article will be classified as uncategorised and may not appear on the site. Fill out the metadata form on the right side of the page (see below for more details of this). The name you gave when you registered with the site will appear automatically in the published article. If you want to use a different pseudonymn, put it in the Author Alias field.
- Choose a start and end date which will determine the period of time when the article will be published. For example, if your item is publicising an event, choose the day after the date of the event as the end date and it will be automatically unpublished on that date. When finished, click Save.
Metadata
- After writing articles, don't forget to fill in the metadata section. Metadata is "data about data". In this case, the data is your article and the "data about it" is a brief description of the subject of the article--a single sentence will do--and some keywords. Add the keywords--separated by commas--use no more than 3 and try to be specific. This is important to the functioning of the site's Related Items module which lists titles of other articles on related subjects at the end of articles. The keywords determine this listing. For example, if you write a news item and add the keyword "islamophobia" to its metadata section, all other articles with that same key word will be listed at the end of the article in the Related items section.
Images
- To select an image, first click the mouse in a suitable place in the article for the image to be inserted, then click on the image button at the bottom of the article. Either choose an image that is already uploaded to the Media Manager gallery or click on the browse button to find and upload one from your computer. The images are stored alphabetically. Select the image you want by clicking on it. Chose right or left alignment from the drop down menu and finally select insert. The image should appear in the article. Drag the corners of the image to make it a suitable size. You can also drag the image around the article to position it.
- It is essential that images should have a small file size--generally between 7 to 12 kilobytes. This will make the pages load faster--especially for people with dial-up modems, many of whom live in rural areas and the poorer countries. High resolution images from digital cameras must be reduced drastically to these limits. And large picture dimensions (width and height) should be reduced to an appropriate size--e.g. 200 pixels high and 265 pixels wide. This should be done before uploading to the site.
- Please avoid spaces in image file names. Use underscores to connect words and choose file names that identify the event's title, location and date so that they are meaningful to other users of the site--e.g mayday_peacegardens_1may08.gif. Avoid meaningless file names like pic_012.gif.
- An image editor is necessary to compress files sizes and reduce picture width and height. Images should ideally be saved in the lossless gif or png format. The jpg format is a very common format, but it is "lossy"--it loses some of its image quality every time you edit and re-save it. Lossless image formats do not lose image quality. A powerful free and open source image editor called GIMP can be downloaded here. It is available for Linux, Mac and Windows, but takes a little getting used to. Google Picasa is also free, but only available for Windows. It is less powerful than GIMP, but easier to use (Mac and Linux users please suggest other suitable editors).
- In Windows, image file sizes can be seen by right clicking on the un-opened file and selecting properties. In Macs, files sizes can be seen by highlighting the closed file and pressing Apple+i. In Linux this can be done by (Linux user please complete this sentence).
- Right aligning images in articles results in text flowing around the image. Left align is the default and results in the image being placed on top with the text underneath.
Audio-Video
For site users who login from the homepage:
- Go to the YouTube (or other video site) page where your video clip is located.
- Copy the web-address (URL) at the top of the video page.
- Login to the Manchester TUC website
- Click on Submit an Article.
- Click somewhere in the article where you want the video to appear.
- Then click on the AVR Media button at the bottom of the web editor and paste the web address into the URL form field.
- Press Enter (Return) on your keyboard and the rest of the form fields will automatically be filled in.
- Click on Preview (optional) and then Insert and you will find that some code has been inserted into the article which will look something like this: {youtubejw}IgCGq7aK{youtubejw}.
- You can cut and paste the code anywhere in the article according to preference.
- Save the article and the clip should appear in the website.
For site back-end users (for website administrators only):
- Go to the YouTube (or other video site) page where your video clip is located.
- Copy the web-address (URL) at the top of the video page.
- Login into the website back-end
- Click on Article Manager
- Click on New
- Click somewhere in the article where you want the video to appear.
- Then click on the AVR Media button at the bottom of the web editor and paste the web address into the URL form field.
- Press Enter (Return) on your keyboard and the rest of the form fields will automatically be filled in.
- Click on Preview (optional) and then Insert and you will find that some code has been inserted into the article which will look something like this: {youtubejw}IgCGq7aKK6M{youtubejw}.
- You can cut and paste the code anywhere in the article according to preference.
- Save the article and the clip should appear in the website.