Introduction

Your Website is design with a Joomla Content Management System (CMS)

  • A Content Management System is a very powerful type of software that assists in the organization and presentation of content on a website.
  • A CMS separates the content from the design so all you have to do is update the content in an easy to use editor similar to Microsoft Word. This makes it easy to keep the site-wide design coherent and easy to change. It also makes adding content easy for non-technical people.

Logging into your website:

  • You have the ability to control your website from two different sides, the Front-end and the administrative Back-end.
  • The frontend allows you to control your website from the perspective of a site visitor.
  • The backend is a special portal into the inner workings of your website, and no site visitor will ever see it.
  • If you want to edit a single particular article, the easiest way to do it is by logging into the Front-end.

Log into the Frontend of your website

  • Click on the link that says login or a login form, this might either be in the side column or at the bottom of the page.
  • Then enter your username and password.

  • This logs you into the Frontend of the site and allows you to edit articles in the context of the overall website, with the template and modules displayed around the content you're editing.

Once logged in, you will see that just above each article in the mainbody is a small icon that looks like a pencil and paper now appears.

Editing the content of your site from the Front-end

  • Now that you have logged in, you can just click on the Edit icon to make live changes to an article.

Task 3 – Edit an article

  • Click on the edit icon, to bring up the editing screen. Change the title of the article, and maybe a word or two in the text. Try to avoid using punctuation in the title of the article when possible.
  • When you're done, click Save.

Task 4 – Edit the articles on your site

  • Go through your site and edit the articles to match your needs a bit better. Don't worry about final copy at this point, we are just learning how to edit.
  • Move around your site and see which pages have articles on them that you can edit.
  • From the Frontend you can edit anything that has the Edit icon above its title. You cannot, however, edit a module's content.
  • You'll learn how to edit modules on Lesson 2. As you play around with the text on your site, don't worry about the images. Uploading, placing, and formatting images embedded in text is a more complicated task that deserves its own tutorial in a couple days.

Be sure to save often! Your site is going to log you out if you keep an editing window open and unused for more than a few minutes.