I was making a point that Joomla! had many,
many layers to it and my student said to me, yeah, it's like an onion;
many, many layers, and it also can make you cry.
One of the ways Joomla! can make you cry
is it has so many configuration screens, and sometimes you're not even
using those configuration screens.
So they just serve to confuse clients or they offer you options that you're not
going to use in your Web site and you just like to get rid of things.
Fortunately, we even have configuration screens for getting rid of configuration screens,
and I wanted to show you those here in this next video.
So if we go on up to Content and we go our Article Manager again, and I am just
going to peek inside of this first article here about the farmers,
just to take a quick peek at it.
You'll notice that we have all of these tabs that go across the top.
So far I've really just focused on this first screen about the article details
and the title, the category, and the text that we are putting in, in another
video I covered the images and links down here on the bottom, but there's also
stuff over here on the side in terms of is it published or not published,
what languages it is in, we can switch to a tab about Publishing Options where we can
set a Start and Finish Publishing date.
If you have a something that's sensitive, for time, you want it on the site
for a certain period of time and it come down automatically,
you can schedule that kind of thing.
You can have these Article Options.
This is yet another way that you can turn on and off page titles and categories
and authors and so forth.
This time on an article by article basis rather than on a menu basis
or a global basis, and we have a screen here for configuring Metadata
and our Article Permissions.
So this is a lot of stuff here, it's nice now that it's behind these tabs.
So it's a little bit less obvious to clients, but it's quite possible that
you're never going to change these Publishing Options, and you're never
ever going to access these Article Options and it's also possible that you
might never ever want to access the images and links interface down here in the bottom.
So Joomla! has provided a way that we can turn these things on and off.
So if I hit my Close button here and I go into my Options item here on the top
and I go to Editing Layout, I have four options here, Show Publishing
Options, Show Article Options, and then Front end Images and Links, and
Administrator Images and Links.
The Publishing Options refers to that tab that I just showed you inside of an
article where you were editing.
The Publishing Options tab lets you determine the start and finish publication dates,
it lets you set the author for the article, that kind of thing.
Do you even need that page at all? It's quite possible that in your Joomla! site that you don't.
You can turn this off globally by setting this to No.
Likewise, the Article Options is that long, long list of titles and titles that
are linked and the show Print icons and Email icons and the hits and
all kinds of things like that.
Do you even need that on an article by article basis?
Chances are for this one in particular, probably not, and it really just
gets your clients into trouble. So you can turn this off globally as well.
Then finally these last two refer to the bottom of the main article editing screen.
There is the place where we can set the small version of the picture versus the
big picture and the set of links that might be associated with a given article.
We use these in putting together our Solar blog entries.
You can turn on and off that interface as well.
By default that interface is turned off on the front end of the Web site
and what I mean by this is it's possible to edit articles from the front end of the Web site.
I haven't showed you how to do that yet.
I will show you how to do that in a much later video, but you could not give
your clients access to editing those articles on the front end of the Web site
or adding those particular features by hitting this to No, but allow people to
have access to that interface by saying Yes on the back end,
which is the administrator side.
I am actually going to set all four of these No just for the moment,
so you can see how this works.
If I say Save & Close and I go back into the same Farmers installing solar power article,
I still have the tab for Publishing Options, but when
I click it, nothing changes.
Notice that my Article Details screen is still present and what's more the tab
that said Article Options is now gone entirely.
So we don't even have the tab available to us anymore for those Article Options.
Also, on the bottom of the Article Details screen down here on the bottom,
notice that all of that interface for adding those small versions of pictures
or big versions of pictures or those links, those are all gone.
That's a wonderful thing.
We've just simplified the interface hereby quite a bit and made things
a lot easier for clients, because there is fewer options.
There are fewer things to distract them. Now in true Joomla! fashion,
now that we have configured this to turn these things off globally,
for all the articles, we can override these interfaces on an article by article basis.
This tab for Configure Edit Screen will allow you to now say, oh, but for this article,
because this is a Solar blog article, I do want to show the
Administrator Images and Links, although I'll leave my other things set to No.
If I say Save, now when I scroll on down the page here to the bottom I have
that whole interface down here where I can put in my small images and my big
images again and configure those, but this interface will now only be available
in this particular article. I don't really want to do that.
So I am going to go back here to the Configure Edit Screen and I am going to
switch this back to Use Global and I'm going to go ahead and say Save & Close
and I am going to go back to my Article Options and under my Editing Layout tab
I am going to turn on the Administrator Images and Links.
I'm using it in the Solar blog right now.
I'm just going to leave that available to all of the articles on the Web site
and what I'd do is educate my client that, that interface is only for the Solar blog.
Don't use it on other parts of the Web site and leave it at that.
So I am going to go ahead and say Save & Close and now if I take a look at the
Farmers installing solar power in record numbers article, you'll see that
I have this interface at the bottom for adding images and links.
I do not have anything on the Publishing Options tab and I do not have my
Article Options tab at all, and that is true for any article that we happened to
look at here in the backend of Joomla!.
None of those options that I just went through affect the way the Web site will
appear to the public to somebody who is not logged in and editing an article.
The options I just showed you pertain only to editing articles and what kind of
interfaces are available for doing that.