Content

An article is a page of written content that the hub stores and serves itself: the About page, the terms of use, a policy statement, a short explanation of how the community works. Articles are the hub's own pages, as opposed to the resources, wiki pages, group pages, and publications that members create.

Every hub needs a handful of these and almost none needs more. A hub that opens to the public wants an About page, a contact page, a citation or acknowledgement page the funder asks for, and a page of terms. That is the whole job for most managers: half a dozen pages, written once, edited twice a year. If your hub already has those and nobody has complained about them, you can skip this section and come back when something needs changing.

Articles live in the Content menu of the administrator interface, which holds three screens:

Menu entry	Screen	Chapter
Article Manager	The list of articles and the article editor.	Article Manager
Category Manager	The categories articles are filed under.	Categories
Media Manager	The shared image and file library the editor's image button browses.	—

Add New Article and Add New Category appear under their managers when you may create one.

Nothing on these screens is dangerous by accident, with one exception, and it is worth knowing before you open anything: Delete on the article list and the category list does not delete. It sets a state. Elsewhere in the administrator interface a button with the same wording erases the row for good. States, deleting and check-out says which is which, and it is the chapter to read before you press a delete button anywhere on this hub.

What an article is not

Managers who arrive here from another job often assume this is where the hub's content lives. It is not. Datasets, tools and their documentation are resources. Formally released datasets are publications. Pages members write and revise themselves are wiki pages. Group material belongs to the group. Questions, 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.

The test is simple: if you type it once and visitors only read it, it is an article. If it has authors, versions, tags, ratings or a review step, it is not, and building it as an article throws all of that away.

Content is not layout

What you type into an article is content, not presentation. The template supplies the typography, the colours, and the page furniture; the article supplies the words. Styling individual articles by hand fights the template and breaks the next time the template changes. If a page needs a look the template does not give it, change the template — see Templates.

Where articles appear

An article has no URL of its own until something points at it. The two ways to reach one are:

• A menu item. A menu item of type Articles → Single Article carries its own alias, and that alias — plus the aliases of its parents — is the URL. This is how the pages shipped with a hub work: the sample Terms of Use article is reached at /about/terms because a menu item with that path points at it.
• The article's own category path. With no menu item, the hub matches a URL against category path plus article alias.

Both are explained in URLs, along with redirects.

In this section

• Article Manager — what articles are for, a worked example that publishes an About page end to end, the article list, the editor, categories, and the publishing workflow.
• Categories — the shared category manager, which serves articles, user notes, the knowledge base, and events.
• URLs — how an article's address is built, and how to redirect one address to another.
• States, deleting and check-out — what published, unpublished, archived and trashed store, which delete buttons are permanent, and why a record gets stuck checked out. This one is not about articles alone. It explains behaviour you will meet on every list screen in the administrator interface, and it is the most useful page in this section.

Every option on the Article Manager's Options screen is listed in the Content configuration reference.