Joomla is a very flexible web building tool with great capacity. One of the most useful content management features in Joomla is the "Start Publishing" option. This tool allows you to schedule publishing your Joomla article on a later date. It also allows you to set the article creation date to a later date.
The start publishing date allows us to decide the future date when an existing article will be published automatically. This allows you to create time-sensitive content before you need it, and publish it automatically when it is considered the right time to publish it.
You will also want to read:
Basic Documentation on Joomla Website Administration
Basic Virtuemart Configuration Tutorial
Fixing Problems: Notices, Warnings and Errors on Your Joomla Website
Good Optimization Will Boost The Speed of Your Joomla Website
How Secure is Your Joomla Website
The advantage is that you can prepare your content for future publication and that will make it easy for you to prepare your content when you have time and set it for later publication. It also makes it possible to edit an article that had errors just before the actual publishing date.
in this post, I'm going to explain how you can schedule articles to be published in future.
Step #1. Create a new article
Go to Content
Articles
Add New Article
Now create your Joomla article. Fill in all the details such as title, content, category and more.
Step #2. Set the start publishing date
Let's define the future date when you want this article to be available for your site's visitors.
Go to the Publishing tab.
Choose a date in the Start Publishing field
Schedule a Joomla article to publish in the future
Optional: if you want to define a date to unpublish the article, select a date in the Finish Publishing field.
Schedule a Joomla article to unpublish in the future
Click "Save & Close" once you're done.
Also read:
How to Copy a Joomla Module and Install on Another Website
How to Fix The Joomla White Screen of Death
How to Revert Back to a Previous Version of Joomla
How to Speed Up Your Joomla Website
How to manually update a Joomla website
If everything was setup correctly, the article will be published automatically based on the "Start publishing" option.
In your Joomla articles screen, your content will show a yellow exclamation mark. You'll also see a tooltip with the status "Published, but is Pending" and the date the article will appear on your site.
If an article has a Finished Publishing date that has passed, you'll see a yellow clock icon. You'll also see a tooltip with the status "Published, but has Expired", together with both the start and finish publishing dates.
Joomla Articles Creation and Editing Guide
Above, you have understood how to create an article in Joomla. There are a few tricks you still need to understand in content editing. Adding a new article can be done from the content menu in the Joomla backend. Go to content > Articles > Add New Articles from where you can begin to add an article. To add beauty to your website article, you need to be able to change the font size,aaa images and tweak a few more settings. We will look at some of them in the restofthis post.
Increasing your font size: There had been an issue with editing fonts in most websites. Dealing with font sizes for your website can be achieved in template parameters. However, for this post, we are concerned with editing text in articles. I will recommend that you begin by editing the text editor plugin. Go to Plugins > TinyMCE and change the functionality from Advanced to Extended. That will enable such functionalities like text color, font size, and background colors. It comes with lots of functionalities.
Adding the Read More Button: In Joomla 3.5 and above, the read more button is within the top tool bar. In earlier versions, this can be found at the bottom of the page. To add the read more button, click on the position where you want the read more link to be placed and click the read more icon, you will see a red line indicating the position where the read more had been inserted.
Also read:
How to move a Joomla website from localhost to a live server and secure it
A Comprehensive Guide to Joomla Article Creation and Editing
Joomla Extensions Manager Tutorial
Joomla Manual Installation Tutorial
Adding an Image: There are two major ways to add an image in Joomla. The first and preferable way is to click on “images and Links” on the sub-menu bar. This is suitable when you want the image to be placed around the article header position and you want a single article in the introductory section and in the article header position. This method will not allow you to place articles within the article body in any desirable position.
To add an article in the article body and be able to place multiple articles in the body of a Joomla article, place your cursor at the position you will want the image to be placed, from within the text editor icons, you will locate “image”. Click on image within the editor region and locate your desired image within the media folder. Select your desired image and chose your alignment. Insert the image and save.
Using The Options: From the sub-menu bar, you will find the options menu. The options will allow you to choose whether to include the article published date, author category, email link, print icon, article view hits and several other features in your article. You can select your preferred options for your Joomla article and save. That will determine whether you will have icons like email and print, author and article created date appear on your website.
Publishing: The publishing tab is used to set the publishing date – both or the day to start publishing and the date to end publishing. If you have no reason to set these dates, then simply leave it vacant and Joomla will set it automatically once you save your article.
Setting the Category: You can have articles categorized to focus different areas. For instance, in a news website, you can have categories like sports, opinion, politics and interviews. You will set your articles to different categories depending on the article. To do this, just check on the right sidebar in your article admin area and you will find the category link with a drop down arrow. Set the article to any chosen category of your choice and save.
Access Level: Access levels allow you to define who can view an article on the frontend. There are articles you can reserve for only registered members, you can define these access levels. To do this, check the right side bar column and under “access”, select and define your access level.
Status: The status sets the article to published, unpublished, trashed or archived. Basically, you will be more concerned with published and unpublished articles which essentially will define whether or not an article will be available to frontend users. If an article is set to archived, it will still be available to frontend users. Articles that are set to unpublished or thrashed status will not be visible from the frontend.
Also read:
Joomla Menu Manager Tutorial
My Joomla Website Displays a Blank Page, What Should I do
Why The Progressive Caching in Joomla Should Be Avoided
Inserting Tables: You can insert tables into your Joomla website from the article text area. Simply click on table. To insert a new table with defined column and rows, choose your preferred option. You can also create a row or column and add rows and columns to an existing table. All these can be achieved from the article text area using the table drop down button.
Formatting: Text formatting allows you to make bold texts, italicize, apply strokes, underscores, superscript, and subscript, apply HI texts, H2, H3, H4, H5, and H6 texts to your Joomla article. It also allows the use of blocks, blockquotes, upper case, inline and codes in your Joomla article. The formatting tool truly have a wide range of applications for a Joomla article.
Insert: The insert button is used to insert special characters, signs, insert image and hyperlink to your Joomla article.
Edit Button: The edit button is used to copy, paste and cut texts from the Joomla article area. There are no special functions outside these associated with the edit tab.
Saving the article: There are four options for saving a Joomla article. There is the save button. This allows you to save your work and not leave the article editing area, that is, it does not close the work area for editing your Joomla article. The save and close option returns you to the article manager after an article is saved. The article manager will present you with a full list of all the articles you have created in your Joomla website. The save and new option will create a new blank page for you to create a new article. It saves the article you have created or edited and opens a fresh and new page for you to begin creating of a fresh and new article. The last save option is the save and copy option. This will save your article and create a fresh copy of it with same header and content. It duplicates the article you have just saved and adds (2) to it to create a differentiation.
