How to create a Joomla article - Step-by-step Guide

Are you a Joomla newcomer and have no idea how to create a Joomla article? This A-Z tutorial is absolutely for you! This detailed guide will show you how and where to start when making Joomla articles.

Furthermore, this guide includes a wide range of setting options allowing you to build articles in your own style with custom layout.

Table of content

How to create a new article in Joomla

Displaying Joomla articles on your sites

Joomla article default settings

Joomla extensions to customize articles

Custom layout for Joomla articles

Final thoughts

How to create a new article in Joomla

Joomla allows users to create articles in a variety of different ways, but in this tutorial, we will focus on the quickest and easiest method.

Go to Contents -> Articles -> Add New Articles

Display Joomla article in frontend

Once you’ve created a new article, you’ll need to know how to display it in the front end of your site.

There are three ways common ways to present Joomla articles:

• Option 1: Display the article in the Single Article format.
• Option 2: Display article in the Category Blog format.
• Option 3: Display a single article in a Custom module.

Option 1: Display single article in the Single Article format

This option allows Joomla users to show a single article when users click on a certain menu item.

1. Go to Menu -> hover the Menu name ( in which you want to display the article) -> Add New Menu Item2. In Menu Item Types: Select -> Articles -> Single Article3. In the ‘Menus: New Item’ screen, fill in Menu item Title and choose Menu. 

Then, go to the ‘Article’ option and Select -> Choose the article (which you want to be displayed).Additionally, you can set up how the article is opened in a browser window when the menu item is selected. In Target Window, you can choose:

• New window without navigation: A new browser window will be opened without an address bar, toolbar or menu bar.
• A new window with navigation: A new browser window will be opened with the address bar, toolbars or menu bar.

Let’s take a look at an example. When you click on the ‘About us’ menu item, you can see the article as follows:

Option 2: Display article in Category Blog format

With a vast array of module options, Joomla users can present on their sites not only a single article but also a list of articles in category blog type by following these steps:

1. Go to Menu -> hover over the Menu name ( in which you want to display the article) -> Add New Menu Item

2. In Menu Item Types: Select -> Articles -> Category Blog3. In the ‘Menus: New Item’ screen, fill in Menu item Title and choose Menu.

Then, go to ‘Choose a category’ and Select -> Select a category.Similar to displaying an article in a menu item, you can choose how the category blog will be opened in the Target Window option.

To illustrate an example, we created the JoomlaShine category with multi-articles, which will be displayed as a blog in the ‘Our product’ menu item:

Option 3: Display single article in Custom module

In addition, a single Joomla article can be displayed by using Custom Module. This option allows users to display a Joomla article anywhere on their site with the selected module position.

1. Go to Extensions -> Modules

2. Click New Module -> select Custom module type3. Customize your article and choose the position where it will be displayed.Here is an example of how to show a single article in the left Custom Module on the site:Besides, these default options in the Joomla core system, now users can take advantage of a huge number of extensions for displaying Joomla articles in custom styles. For example:

• Joomla articles in a popup module: SJ Popup, PopUp Aholic, Pop Any Article...
• Joomla articles slider: SJ Article Slider, BT Content Slider, JA Content Slider ….
• Joomla articles carousel: Article Carousel for Joomla, StarAzure Article Carousel, Easy Article Carousel...

Joomla article default settings

1. The Joomla Article Manager allows users to edit, publish or control the settings for all of their articles.

From Joomla Administrator Panel, select Content and go to Articles.

You can see the Joomla article manager as follows:This table includes all Joomla articles on your sites with detailed information such as the title, author, language, and so on.

From here, you can also click on the status icon to change the article status to Publish, Unpublish, Trashed, Featured or Archive.

2. The Joomla Article Options includes nine tabs in which you can change the settings to display articles with different layouts and formats.

Note: Settings in Article Options will apply automatically to all articles on your pages (if you want to customize a single article, you need to edit it specifically in the article itself).

To access Joomla Articles Options :

• Step 1: Go to System -> Global Configuration.
• Step 2: In Component -> go to Article.

Show print, email, icon, or voting

Many Joomla users want to customize their articles with a print or vote function to enhance their audience engagements.

If you are also interested in these features, simply following these steps:

• Step 1: Open the Joomla Article Options screen.
• Step 2: Select show Show on Show Print, Show Email, Show Icon or Show Voting.

Once you activate these features, they will immediately be integrated into your article. Simples.

To see the voting function, you’ll need to take a couple more steps.

Go to Extension -> Plugin and search for “Content vote”

Turn it on by checking the box under Status.It will look like this once it’s been activated:

Joomla article permissions

The permission settings allow users to control who can take action on articles on your sites.

You need to go through two steps to access Joomla article permissions:

• Step 1: From the Article Options screen, open the Permission tab.
• Step 2: Select new settings for user groups.

Here are the default user groups:For example, you might want to customize settings for only the Registered Group.

On this table, you will change the settings for Create and Edit to Allowed and for Delete to Not Allowed.This setting allows people who are already registered on the Joomla to edit and create new articles, but they won't be able to delete any articles on the site.

Joomla article tags

Tags in Joomla’s article will allow users to organize the content in a flexible way. The same tags can be used for many items and each item can have many tags as desired.

All Joomla articles with specific tags will be shown on the list if we browse the link for that tag, so we can see all articles with the same subject or similar topic in the group.

Here are the two steps to create Joomla article tags:

• Step 1: Creating a new tag for articles
• Step 2: Adding tags to articles

Step 1: Creating a new tag for articles

Go to Components -> Tags

From this screen, you can create tags in the same that you would create an article. Besides the name, tags can include a description, images or other similar content.

You can also choose the parent for tags to create nested tagging.

Step 2: Adding tags to articles

To add tags for your article, simply:

1. Open the article
2. In the Content tab, click on the tag box and begin typing out your tags.
3. Select available tags.

Make sure that ‘show tags’ is switched on in the article options.

Joomla article revisions

Accidents happen, and sometimes an article may be lost or overwritten. Joomla’s versions feature comes in handy to prevent this from being an issue.

This option builds backups each time you save to easily recover your articles in case you accidentally delete them.

• Step 1: Open Article Option -> Editing Layout tab
• Step 2: Turn on Enable Versions and input a number of the Maximum versions that you want to keep of each article. This allows you to go back and revisit previous versions with ease.

Now that the content version control feature is enabled. To see the article version history, you can open the article and Click Versions.

Joomla frontend article editing

To be able to edit Joomla articles in the front-end, you will need permission granted by the site’s administrator. If you don’t have that, then you’ll need to set it up in Joomla Article Permissions.

Step 1: Log-in to your account from the frontend.

Step 2: Find the article you’d like to edit. From here, you can see the settings button on the top right. Click on the icon -> EditThe editing article window will open like the picture below:

Be sure that you save your work after editing.

Joomla extensions to customize articles

Joomla’s default system offers users a fair amount of settings, however, sometimes it is not enough to create an awesome website with high-traffic.

Depending on the website, Joomla’s creators might want to customize their content and site’s construction in specific areas to help visitors have a better experience.

For example, a blogger might want to add the Joomla article rating & review feature for all of their articles to see if their audience thinks about their blog posts over time and to highlight the most popular content.

With Joomla’s official extensions library, you can easily find a range of article rating extensions, which is a powerful function to get feedback on your content and assess which topics are the most highly rated.

Similarity, you can easily find categories of extensions which can help you customize other areas of your articles.

• Joomla article comments: This lets your reader post comments on your content page or provide valuable feedback.
• Print & PDF extension: Export or import Joomla articles to PDF files and for printing.
• Extension search: Allows you to use the Joomla article search function from any page on site.
• Multiple categories: Allows the publishing of a Joomla article into multiple categories.
• PageBuilder extension: Content construction tool to manage content on sites easier and more convenient. Here are the top favorite page builder extensions from Joomla users: JSN PageBuilder 3, SP Page builder, JD Builder.

Moreover, if you use any Template from JoomlaShine, you will be able to create new articles in various types of audio, gallery, quotes…, which can maximize flexibility for your content on Joomla sites.

Custom layout for Joomla articles

Can’t find a way to change the print icon position in your article? The default template doesn’t meet your design expectations?

With complex structured articles, you might need more advanced options like the custom column layouts - this allows for more flexible built-in functionalities.

We have two options to customize the layout for Joomla articles.

Creating template override

This is the simplest option. You only need a basic knowledge of php and html:

Step 1: Extensions -> Template manager -> Template

Step 2: Open Create overrides tab

Step 3: Component -> com_content -> article

After step 3, you will see a message saying that the new override has been created successfully.

Open Editor tab-> Html -> com_content -> article.

Here, you can find your new php file and can make changes in the coding to customize the new layout. You can rename this file as well - here we renamed it to customlayout.php.Step 4: Go to Content -> Article

Step 5: Open the article that you’d like to customize, then go to the Options tab and choose the Custom Layout.

Using Joomla article layout extensions

So what about if you’re not familiar with php or html?

Don’t worry! Many Joomla suppliers have provided custom layout extension to customize content layout easily from a single article, category blog, category list to article modules.

Here are some of the highlights.

• EasyLayouts: gives you full control of the placement of your custom fields in articles, blog or lists. Allowing creating layout with custom field base columns in your category list view without coding knowledge.
• FLEXIcontent: easily drag and drop templates from another article and provide multi-category assignments.
• Content Templater: allow you instantly assign a predefined set of options to your articles, save and reuse the template for future articles.

Final thoughts

Joomla articles are an inevitable part of your website. They contribute a major amount to the site’s content and make it a lot more informative.

We hope this tutorial has guided you to create and display Joomla articles on sites in the most effective way.