Article Manager · Hub managers · Hubzero Documentation

The Article Manager lists every article on the hub and opens the editor for one. Reach it at Content → Article Manager, or directly at /administrator/index.php?option=com_content. The screen is titled Article Manager: Articles, and carries a submenu with two entries, Articles and Categories.

You come here to write or fix one of the hub's own pages, and for nothing else. Almost every change on this screen is reversible: unpublishing takes a page off the site and republishing brings it back unchanged, and Delete sets a state rather than removing anything. The one thing that cannot be undone from the interface is losing an unsaved edit, which is why the check in Check In exists. Work here with a free hand.

What articles are for

An article is a page of the hub's own prose, written by whoever runs the hub: the About page, the acceptable use policy, the instructions for citing the hub's data, a notice about next month's maintenance window. If you type it once and visitors only read it, it is an article.

Most of a hub's content is not an article, and a manager who does not know that ends up building the whole hub out of them. Tools, datasets and their documentation are resources. Formally released datasets are publications. Pages members edit themselves are wiki pages. A group's own pages belong to the group. Questions and answers, forum threads, blog entries, support tickets, knowledge base entries and courses each have their own component, their own permissions, and their own chapter in Components. Those components hold far more than text — authorship, versions, tags, ratings, review — and an article holds none of it.

Worked example: an "About this hub" page

Nearly every hub needs a page saying who runs it, what it is for, and who to write to. It is the first article most managers create, and it exercises everything in this chapter. The rest of the chapter refers back to it.

Decide whether it needs a category. A category does two jobs: it groups articles in the list and the batch panel, and — for an article that no menu item points at — it supplies the front of the URL. A single About page reached through a menu item needs neither, so leaving it in Uncategorised is a defensible answer. Create a category when you can already see the second and third article coming: an About section that will also hold a contact page and an acknowledgements page. To create one, go to Content → Category Manager → New, set Title to About, leave Alias blank so it is generated as about, leave Parent Item at - No parent -, and select Save & Close. This example uses that category.
Write the article. Go to Content → Article Manager → New. Set Title to About this hub. Leave Alias blank; it is generated as about-this-hub. Set Category to About. Most of the rest arrives with the value you want: Status is Published, Language is All, Start Publishing is now, and every panel down the right is set to Use Global. Check that Access reads Public, and fill in Meta Description under Metadata Options — the sentence a search engine prints under the page title. Leave everything else alone.
Type the body. Article Text opens in whichever editor plugin the Default Editor setting names, at Site → Global Configuration on the Site tab. The installer writes ckeditor into the hub's configuration, so on a stock hub you get Editor - CKEditor: a Format menu for headings, the usual bold and italic, lists, blockquote and alignment, Link, Image and Table, and find and replace. There is no Source button until someone turns Source View on at Extensions → Plugin Manager → Editor - CKEditor. Write the page as prose and take headings from the Format menu rather than setting fonts and colours by hand; the template supplies the appearance. Under the text area sit four more buttons, one per enabled button plugin: Article, which inserts a link to another article; Image, which opens the shared library from Content → Media Manager and can upload into it; Page Break; and Read More, which marks where the intro text ends. Use Image for pictures — the Image button in CKEditor's own toolbar is a different dialog that only takes a URL, because a stock hub gives it no server to browse. Select Save & Close.
Publish it. The article is published already, because Status defaults to Published; the list shows it as such in the Status column. Status and Access are different questions. Status decides whether the article exists for the site at all: an unpublished article answers 404, even to someone following a menu item straight at it. Access decides who may read the body of an article that does exist. A published article whose Access is Registered still renders its title to a guest; only the body is withheld, and the guest is shown the intro text and a link to log in only where Show Unauthorised Links is on. The category's access level counts too — a Public article filed in a Registered category is not readable by a guest. Leave both at Published and Public for an About page.
Make it reachable. Publishing does not put the page anywhere. Go to Menus, open the menu you want it in, and select New. Set Menu Item Type to Articles → Single Article, choose About this hub in the Select Article field, set Menu Title to About, and leave Alias blank so it is generated as about. Save, and the page answers at /about. Menus covers the rest of that form, nesting items to build an About section, and showing the menu with a module.
Check it on the site. Open /about in a browser where you are not logged in to the hub; that is what a visitor sees. The menu item's route is the address to publish and to link to. Had you skipped the menu item, the article would have answered at its category path instead, /about/about-this-hub. A 404 means the article is not published, the menu item is not published, or the menu item points at something else. URLs explains how the address is decided.

The article list

Seven filters sit above the list, and a search box.

Filter	What it does
Filter:	Matches the search text against the article title or alias.
- Select Status -	Published, Unpublished, Archived, Trashed, or All.
- Select Category -	One category. Articles in its children are not included.
- Select Access -	One access level.
- Select Max Levels -	Nothing. See the warning below.
- Select Author -	Nothing.
- Select Language -	Nothing.

With no status filter set, the list shows everything except trashed articles. To see trashed articles, set - Select Status - to Trashed.

To find the About this hub article from the worked example, type about in the search box — it matches the title and the alias — or set - Select Category - to About. An article filed in a category nested under About does not appear under that filter.

The columns are Title (with the alias beneath it), Status, Category, Ordering, Access, Created by, Date, Language, and ID. Every column heading except Ordering sorts. Sort by Ordering to enable the up and down arrows and the ordering boxes; ordering is kept per category, so the list is grouped by category while you reorder it.

Selecting the checkboxes of one or more articles enables the toolbar buttons:

Button	What it does
New	Opens an empty article.
Edit	Opens the selected article. Clicking the title does the same.
Publish / Unpublish	Sets the state to Published or Unpublished.
Archive	Sets the state to Archived.
Check In	Releases an article left checked out by someone else.
Delete	Sets the state to Trashed. It does not delete anything.
Options	The component's configuration.

Each button skips articles you lack core.edit.state on and reports the ones it skipped.

Batch processing

Below the list, administrators who hold Create, Edit, and Edit State on com_content get a Batch process the selected articles panel. It sets the access level and the language of the checked articles, and moves or copies them into another category. Choosing a target category is mandatory — the batch is refused without one, even if all you wanted to change was the access level. Copying leaves the originals alone and applies the other changes to the copies.

The editor

New or Edit opens Article Manager: Add New Article or Article Manager: Edit Article. The toolbar is Save, Save & Close, Save as Copy, Save & New, Cancel, and Help. Save as Copy and Save & New both blank the alias, reset the created and start-publishing dates to now, and clear the finish-publishing date.

The main column holds:

Field	Notes
Title	Required.
Alias	The article's own slug. Leave it blank and it is generated from the title.
Category	Required. Lists only the categories you may create in. A new article defaults to Uncategorised.
Status	Published, Unpublished, Archived, or Trashed. Read-only without `core.edit.state`.
Access	The viewing level. A stock hub ships three: Public, Registered, and Special. See Access levels.
Featured	Yes or No. See the warning below.
Language	All, or one installed content language.
Article Text	The body, in the site's default editor. On a stock hub that is Editor - CKEditor; see step 3 of the worked example.

The right column shows the article's ID, who created it and when, and who last modified it and when, above a stack of collapsible panels:

Panel	Holds
Publishing Options	Start Publishing and Finish Publishing, plus Revision and Hits once the article has them. Both dates are shown in your own time zone, and the abbreviation is printed next to the label.
Article Options	Per-article overrides for everything on the component's Articles options — Show Title, Show Author, Show Hits, and the rest. Each defaults to Use Global.
Key Reference	A free-text field for tying the article to a record in another system.
Configure Edit Screen	Only for administrators. Turns the Publishing Options and Article Options panels on or off for everyone, and turns on the Images and links panel.
Images and links	Intro and full-article images with alt text, captions and float, and three arbitrary links. Hidden unless Configure Edit Screen turns it on.
Metadata Options	Meta description, keywords, robots, author, and content rights.

Administrators also get a Permissions block across the foot of the form, setting Delete, Edit, and Edit State for this one article.

Opening an article checks it out to you. Leaving with Save & Close or Cancel checks it back in; closing the browser tab does not, which is what Check In on the list is for.

Featured articles

The Featured field on the article, and the Featured Articles menu item type that lists featured articles, look like the way to choose what appears on a hub's front page. They are not. As the warning above records, the field writes one place and the site's featured page reads another, and nothing fills the table it reads; the page's query joins that table, so it matches no articles at all. A Featured Articles page is empty whatever Featured is set to, and setting Featured to Yes does nothing you can see.

Set the home page with a menu item instead: open the item you want as the front page and set Default Page to Yes. A Single Article item pointed at the About this hub article is a serviceable front page for a new hub. See Menus.

The publishing workflow

An article has one of four states.

State	Meaning
Published	Visible on the site, subject to the access level and the publishing dates.
Unpublished	Not visible.
Archived	Not in ordinary listings; reachable through an Archived Articles menu item.
Trashed	Not visible, and hidden from the article list until you filter for it.

Unpublish the About this hub article while you rewrite it and the menu item stays in the menu, but a visitor who follows it gets a 404 — the site refuses an article that is not published, whether it was reached by menu item or by category path. You keep seeing it, because anyone holding core.edit or core.edit.state on com_content is served unpublished articles as well. Archived articles are served to everyone: archiving takes the article out of the listings, but a menu item pointed straight at it still opens it.

Start Publishing and Finish Publishing narrow a published article to a window. An article published with a start date in the future stays hidden until then.

To recover a trashed article, filter the list by Trashed, open the article, and set Status back to Published.

Options

Most hubs never open this screen. The shipped defaults produce an ordinary article page — title shown, author shown, hits shown — and the settings that matter for a specific page are better set on the article or the menu item, where they affect one page rather than all of them. Come here only when you want the same change on every article: the byline off across the whole hub, say, because a single office writes all of them.

Options on either list opens the com_content configuration: the site defaults for article, category, blog, and list layouts, the integration settings, and the component-wide permissions. Every parameter is listed in the Content configuration reference.

On a single-article layout the precedence is straightforward: a setting on the article wins over the same setting on the menu item, which wins over the global here. A setting left at Use Global falls through to the next level up. So setting Show Author to Hide in the About this hub article's Article Options panel drops the byline from /about, whatever the menu item and the global say.

Blog and featured layouts invert that. There the menu item's setting wins, and the article's value is used only where the menu item's setting is Use Article; if the article has nothing set, the global is used.