At this point, we have a pretty basic Web site up and running, we've got our
categories, all established, we have got our articles more or less in place,
we've created some menus, we've got some dropdowns, it finally started to feel
like something approximating a real site.
So, now that we've gone through the first iteration of the articles, I would
like to show you how we can add some additional features and functionality to these articles.
And one of the things that people ask about a lot is how they can add a PDF to an article.
So I've just received a brochure about this company and they would like this
added to the About page of the Web site.
So we are going to need to go back, edit the About page and add a link to this PDF.
So, I am going to show you how to do that now.
So, in the back end of Joomla!
our first step is going to be to upload this PDF to our Media Manager.
So to do this, what I am going to do is I am going to go to Content>Media Manager,
and I am going to go ahead and make a folder for these.
So, I am going to create a folder, I am going to call it pdf, create that folder.
So there's my folder called PDF and I can put all of my PDFs in there.
And in here, I'm going to go ahead and upload my PDF file.
And so, I am going to go ahead and hit the Upload button, browse for that file,
and that will be on the Desktop, on my Exercise files in Chapter 6, and here's
the kineteco-brochure, go ahead and say Open and Start Upload and we have the
brochure right here.
What we need to do is the path to this particular item, and the way we can do
that is we know that our Media Manager folder is in the images folder inside of Joomla!
and we made a folder called pdf and here's kineteco-brochure.pdf.
So, the full path to this PDF file is images/pdf/kineteco-brochure.pdf,
I am just going to copy this, because this may come in handy.
Now that I have the PDF and a Media Manager, I am going to go to my individual
article and I am going to add a link to that PDF.
So, I am going to go to my Content to my Article Manager, make sure you don't
have any of your filtering turned on.
I'm going to go to my About article.
So I am just going to click on that, and then down here under the Company
Description, I am just going to add another sentence that says Read our
company brochure (PDF).
Always good to warn people that they're going to download a PDF file.
If you want, you can tell them the file size of that PDF.
So we can say it's something like 175K in size.
And so what I need to do is just make a link.
So, I am going to highlight the words Read our company brochure and I'm going to
click on the Link icon here in TinyMCE.
So I am going to click on this link icon and it's going to ask me for the URL for the PDF.
Well, as I said before that URL is images slash (/) and by the way it's the
slash going the other way, backward slashes (/) are here, because I'm working on PC;
images/pdf/kineteco-brochure.pdf.
Then you can choose to open this PDF and the same window or in a different window,
it doesn't really matter what you pick, it's just a matter of being consistent.
I like to open PDFs in a new window as well.
So I am going to go ahead and say Insert and then I am going to say Save & Close.
And now when I go to the front end of the Web site and I go to the About page,
I should be able to scroll on down.
Here is the link to read the company brochure.
When I click this, this will open a new tab and here is my PDF and I have
that all opened in a new tab, came up right away, because it's nice and small
in terms of file size.
Sometimes people are given these PDFs from their print designers, though they
output that as ultimately going to be going to a printing press for example and
they tend to be very, very large in file size.
In fact this brochure that I got was originally 10.5 megabytes and there is just
no need for that on the Web, we don't really need that high-resolution PDF just
for people to take a look at here.
So, I reduced that file size down to 175K, it still looks great on my browser.
So you may want to do that if your clients hands you a PDF and says post it,
and it seems to have a big file size, particularly if you are going to wind up
working with mobile devices that may be on a slow Internet connection and people
who have data plans, be sensitive to the file size of your PDFs and try to get
them as small as possible, so people have a quick download.
So, that's how you add a PDF to your Web site.