How to Use the Article Manager

First, some definitions...

The Article Manager is a content management system that applies web markup templates to a database of content in order to create web pages.

Usually a web site developer/designer writes the templates and installs them along with the Article Manager program onto a web server.

The web site owner(s) use the Article Manager software in a password-protected section of their web site to enter content into the Article Manager database via web-based forms.

The Article Manager publishes HTML pages on the web site by putting the content and the templates together. Those pages are viewable by visitors to the web site. They are completely independent of the Article Manager software once they are published.

There are some Article Manager terms for anyone who is entering content to understand:

Category - a new section of a web site is implemented with Article Manager by setting up a new category. Creating a category in the Article Manager creates a web page on the web site which contains links to articles that are put into that category. It is known as the category index page. For example, a site could be divided into sections called Products, Services, News and Articles. Each one of those would be a category in the Article Manager.Categories can only be created by the web site administrator.
Article - a new piece of content on a web site is implemented with Article Manager by creating a new article. An article has to be put into one of the existing categories. An article always creates a new entry on it's category index page. There are four types of articles:
- Full Article - This creates a new web page on the web site as well as an entry on the category index page. The entry on the category index page always contains a link to the full article's web page.
- Summary Only - This creates an entry on the category index page that is text only. There is no link to anywhere else and there is no additional web page created. This is often used to create topic breaks on a category index page to further sub-divide the category into topics inbetween lists of the other types of articles.
- Internet URL - This creates an entry on the category index page that links to any other web address. It does not create a new web page, it just links to one that already exists.
- Uploaded File - This creates an entry on the category index page with a link to a file that can be downloaded by the web site visitor. It allows you to upload something like a PDF, Word Document, Excel Spreadsheet or any other file you desire that can be downloaded by those reading your site.Articles can be created by anyone who is set up as a Trusted Writer or an Editor.
Users - Access to the Article Manager software is controlled by assigning userids and passwords for four types of users:
- Writer - A user who can create new articles that must be approved by an Editor before they are actually published on the web site. A writer can only modify his own articles.
- Trusted Writer - A user who can create new articles that immediately get published. A Trusted Writer can only modify his own articles.
- Editor - A user who not only can create new articles that immediately get published, but also can approve and modify anybody else's articles.
- Administrator - A user who can do anything and everything in the Article Manager. They have all of the priveleges of an Editor, plus they can create new categories. They can also modify all of the system settings that control absolutely everything about the Article Manager software.Users of any type, except the Administrator, can be given access to only certain categories or to all categories as desired.

Log On to Article Manager

Click on the link below to open your Article Manager in another window:

Public Web Site Content: http://www.sonlight.com/cgi-local/am-main/exec/admin.cgi
Sonlight Forums Manager: http://www.sonlight.com/cgi-local/am-forums/exec/admin.cgi
Sonlight Curriculum Product Manager: http://www.sonlight-curriculum.com/cgi-local/am-products/exec/admin.cgi
Sonlight Staff Intranet: http://www.sonlight.com/cgi-local/am-admin/exec/admin.cgi
Sonlight Forum Moderators Intranet: http://www.sonlight.com/cgi-local/am-moderators/exec/admin.cgi
Sonlight Curriculum Consultants Intranet: http://www.sonlight.com/cgi-local/am-consultants/exec/admin.cgi
Sonlight Curriculum Advisors Intranet: http://www.sonlight.com/cgi-local/am-advisors/exec/admin.cgi

What You'll See...

After you log into the Article Manager you're going to see a screen with a lot of information on it.

Title Bar - The title bar is blue and is at the very top of the screen. It usually has some words that specifically tell you what portion of your web site is controlled by this instance of the Article Manager software. Often times it takes more than one copy of Article Manager to publish all of the areas of a web site. One for the main content, one for the admin area, one for the password-protected members area, etc.To the right of the title are two little buttons. The one with the question mark on it will open a new screen with the help documentation. That will be very useful for you to learn even more about what the Article Manager can do. The other button has an X on it and will log you out of the Article Manager if you click it.
Tool Bar - Under the title bar is a gray tool bar. For everyone except an Administrator there are three options on that toolbar:
- Create Article - takes you directly to the new article screen.
- Article Editor - takes you to a list of articles and from there you can pick an existing article to modify.
- Logoff - logs you out of the Article Manager.

Article Editor

When you log in, you'll be take directly to the Article Editor Screen. From there you can locate any article that you want to modify (as long as you have the proper priveleges) or you can create a new article.

There is a title that says "Article Editor" under the gray toolbar. To the right of that title are two buttons, Refresh and Create New. Refresh just refreshes the screen if you need to. Create New is exactly like clicking on the Create Article option on the gray toolbar, it takes you to the screen where you can enter a new article into the Article Manager.

Next is a text entry field labeled Keyword. If you want to find all of the articles with certain words in their titles you can enter those here. If you want to see all articles in the given category, then leave it blank.

Underneath that is a drop-down selection list labeled Categories. It will show you all of the categories that you have been given access to with your particular login id. Choose the one that you are interested in.

And then there is a drop-down selection list labeled Status. You may choose All, Pending, Visible or Hidden as you desire.

After which is a drop-down selection list labeled PerPage. This will allow you to specify how many articles you want to display on the screen.

Next to that are two buttons:

Search - takes all of the settings that were just described and displays a list of articles that match that criteria. Nothing different will be displayed after you change those settings until you click on this button.
List All - redisplays the screen after resetting all of the configuration settings back to the defaults.

Underneath all of that you'll see a list of articles displayed. They are displayed in the order that they will appear on their category index.

Information about each article is displayed in a separate row on the screen:

The first column in the row is the date that the article was originally created.
The next column displays the title, underneath which is displayed the name of the category it belongs in.
The column to the right of the title is the article status, which tells you whether it is visible, hidden or pending.
Next to the status column are two action links to modify or erase the article.Choose carefully! If you click on erase, you will be prompted to confirm it just in case you accidentally clicked on the wrong thing.

If you click on one of the modify links you will be taken to the same screen as if you clicked on the Create New button, except that all of the form fields will be filled in with a particular article's data, because you are editing it instead of creating a new one.

Create Article Screen

The title on the screen under the gray bar doesn't change, but the rest of the screen does.

There is a Save and Cancel button at the top and bottom of the screen. The Save button will, interestingly enough, save the changes you make and the Cancel button will NOT save them.

Near the top of the screen you'll see some text that will tell you when the article was created and by whom. It also shows you when it was last modified and who did that.

Date/Time - When you first create an article, these will be set to the current date/time from the computer where the Article Manager is loaded, not your computer. They'll stay set to those dates and times on that article forever unless you change them.

Title - Enter the title of your article here. It will be displayed on the category index page where this article gets listed. If this is a Full Article type, then it will also get used as the title on the web page.

Category - Choose the category you want this article to be displayed in from the drop-down selection. It's easy to move an article from one category to another by changing it here when you modify it.

Status - If your user level is just a Writer, then you won't see this option. Your articles automatically get set to pending. Otherwise you must choose one of the following:

pending (awaiting approval) - the article won't be published until an editor changes the status to visible.
visible (displayed on website) - makes the article show up on the category index page.
hidden (not displayed) - takes the article off of the category index page. You might change an article to hidden when it goes out of date, but not erase it because it might be useful again some day.

Filename - lets you specify what the filename of the web page will be on the web server. This only applies to articles that are Full Articles. If you set this to "myfile" it will create a web page on your site called "myfile.html". If you try to enter certain characters it will change them to an underline to make sure that a valid filename is created.

Article Type - these are defined above - Full Article, Summary Only, Internet URL or Uploaded File. This is where you select the type of article you want to create.

Custom Tags - There could be any number of fields next, depending on what your web site needs. Article Manager lets the Administrator configure custom database entry fields that can be used in the templates. Contact your Administrator for more details on what is wanted here.

The main custom tag we have is Article Sequence Number. This allows you to specify what order you want articles to appear on the site when they are published. We usually use an abbreviated alphabetic sequence for the category, then a four digit number for the article sequence. So for the home page you might have sequence numbers like home-0000, home-0010, home-0020, etc. You'll notice that I left a gap in the numbers. That's so it's easy to come back later and put an article inbetween two other articles without having to modify them. If you're dividing a category up into topics using summary articles, then you might want to specify a sequence number like this: home-0000-0000, home-0000-0010, etc. The middle number represents the topic and the last number represents the article sequence within that topic.

Summary - this field is used on all four article types. The text you enter here will be displayed on the category index page, usually underneath the article title.

It all depends on your web site's design as controlled by the templates.

There is a checkbox above the Summary text entry field that is labeled Auto Format. You can click on the question mark next to this to read a very detailed explanation of what this is, but basically it just means that every time you press the enter key when you are typing in your summary text, the Article Manager will automatically put a line break tag (<br>) in your text. You won't see it, but it'll be there on the published web page. If you uncheck this box, then you have to enter all of the paragraph tags (<p>) and line break tags yourself. That's all.

Just type the words you want to say about this article on your category index web page. The idea of the summary for a Full Article, Internet URL or Uploaded File is to describe what the visitor is going to get if he clicks on the link for that article on the category index page. Don't let them be surprised. Be short, sweet and complete in the writing of your Summary text.

Of course, if you want lot's of text displayed on the category index page, there is no limit to what you can put into the summary. This is often the case when it's a Summary Only type article.

Use the enter key to put blank lines between your paragraphs. If Auto Format is turned on, that is all there is to it. If you need or want to enter some HTML tags in your text you can. If you're going to do complicated things like tables and lists, then you should probably turn off Auto Format and do all of the HTML yourself. That's because on the one hand you want it readable, so you're going to be hitting that enter key a lot, but on the other hand, every time you do the Article Manager is going to insert a line break tag for you. You can end up with a lot of extra unwanted white space if you're not careful.

Content - This field is only ever used for Full Article type articles. Whatever you type here will go on the web page that is created with the filename you specified above. It's ignored for the other three article types.

Everything just described for the Summary field about the Auto Format, entering text and HTML applies exactly the same here.

Preview without Publishing - This button is only useful if you're creating a Full Article. If allows you to see what your web page will look like so far, and then come back and modify it some more. Use it to be sure you've not made any mistakes before you publish a page.

Uploaded Images - You can upload up to 25 images per article to be used in either the Summary or Content fields. The images get uploaded directly off of your computer's hard drive into a special directory on your web site where they are available to your web site visitors (as parts of your web pages of course, not individually.)

There is a table on this screen that shows you the names and placeholders of all the images you have uploaded so far for a particular article. If you want to use the same image on multiple pages you must upload it multiple times and it will add some extra characters each time so they can be uniquely identified.

If you've previously uploaded some images you can change the captions, change the images themselves or remove them by clicking on the Manage Images button. Otherwise...

To make new images available to be used in this article, click on the Upload Images button. You'll be taken to a new screen where you use Browse buttons to navigate the hard drive on your computer to find the image you want to upload. Once you've got as many as you want to upload specified, click on the Save button at the bottom of the screen.

On the next screen you can enter captions for your images if you desire. It is not mandatory. The captions you enter will usually be displayed beneath the image whenever you include them in an article's Summary or Content fields. You'll also see your images on this screen, so it's a good thing to check and see if it's the one you want. When you're done on this screen, click on the Save button at the bottom.

You'll be taken right back to the Create/Modify Article screen, but now it'll display the images at the bottom of the screen that you uploaded. Now you can use them in your article.

You'll notice that the Placeholder column shows ***imagex***, ***imagey***, etc., where x and y are numbers. If you type that exact text anywhere in your Summary or Content field, then the Article Manager will insert that image into the web page there.

You can specify how you want the image displayed:

***imagex:left*** - aligns the image to the left and wraps the surrounding text around it.
***imagex:right*** - aligns the image to the right and wraps the surrounding text around it.
***imagex:center*** - breaks the text before and after it and centers the image on the page. Text does not wrap around it.