How to publish stories and news on this web

It's easy to add your own content to this site. You can post a story, a news item, prayer request, or even a whole prayer letter.

Creating a new item

1. Log in The login menu is located near the bottom of the left panel. If you have not registered yet, you need to do that first (click on the Register link at the bottom of the login menu). If you are already registered, just enter your user name and password, then click on the Login button. (When you first register, you are added as a "Registered user" but not as an author. To be able to post new content, the administrator will have to change your status to "author", so please tell the administrator if this is what you want.)

2. After you have logged in, there will be a new item, "User Menu" on the left panel. This menu includes these items: Your details: edit your name, password, email, preferences, etc. Submit news: this is how you add your own items to the site. They don't have to be "news," but anything you want to add. It's possible to include pictures in your item, but it's a little more complicated and will be explained separately. Submit Weblink: you can add a link (URL) to a interesting or useful site. This link will show up in the Links section of the website. Check-In my items: says you have finished editing all your items, so that they can be edited by others (i.e. moderators, editors). Log out: close your personal session with the site. Not really necessary but generally a good idea for security reasons.

 3. Entering your item. When you click on "Submit News", a new page will open with a form for you to enter your news. The blank form looks like this: 

4. Enter a title for your article.

5. Select a category from the drop-down menu. This may be adjusted later and put into a given section of the website.

6. Enter the content for your story in the main panel. You can use the formatting buttons to set the font and stlye, create lists, and insert tables, horizontal lines, and pictures. But if you want to simply enter plain text, that's fine ... an editor may come along later and make the layout more pretty for you.

7. Save your document frequently! An unfortunate feature of Joomla!, the system running the website, is that users are logged off after 10 or 15 minutes of inactivity, and you will be seen as inactive while you are entering data. There are two main ways around this. First, you can remember to press the Apply button often enough to avoid timing out. That button saves your work and returns you to the same editor page. Second, you can write your item in a different editor, such as Wordpad, Open Office, or Word, then simply paste it into the window for the item you are creating on this website.

8. When you are finished, you can click on the Save icon (a diskette) to save the article and close the editor. As noted above, you can click on the Apply button to save the article but continue editing it. Finally, you can click on the Close button (red X) to cancel your editing and discard all the changes.

What happens when you've finished?

Whenever your item is saved, a message (but not email [?]) is sent to the administrators/moderators to let them know of new content available. The moderator must approve the article before it appears on the website. Since they may not notice your article immediately, you may want to email them yourself so your article can be published promptly.

Using the Intro Text and Main Text panels

In some contexts such as the home page (front page), only the introductory text of each article appears. This allows a more concise presentation and neat appearance. When visitors click on the item, they are taken to a separate page containing the full item. For this reason, if your item is more than a paragraph or two long, you should generally put the first bit of text into the Intro Text panel of the editor, and the remainder into the Main Text (optional) panel, which is at the bottom of the editor page.

Adding pictures

You can most easily add photos by clicking on the Insert/Edit Image button (the tree icon) in the editor bar. However, you can only add photos that have already been uploaded to this or another site, as there is no "upload" function in this menu. A good way to add photos is to upload them to a Flickr account, then use the Insert/Edit Image button to add a reference to the thumbnail or small size version of your photo on Flickr.