Guide to Authoring

Types of Articles

There are two basic types of articles:  Single Page Articles and Multi-Page Articles.  The multi-page article is simply a collection of single page articles with a table of contents to allow the reader to quickly access any of the pages.  The pages can be thought of as chapters.

We will describe here how to create a regular article since multi-page articles differ only that you create a MultiPage Article container first but then put inside it a number of regular articles.

Creating Your Article

The first step is to go to your Member Folder or a folder or multi-page article within it.  Click on add > article.  This will give a form allowing you to give the article a title, description, and body text.  The various fields in the form are:

Title

The title will appear at the top of the article and is most important for search engines.  Important keywords in your topic should be used in the title.

Description

The description of the article will appear in search result listings and in large type at the beginning of the article.  It is usually a summary of the article.

Body

The Kupu Editor window lets you enter the main body of the article.  You are free to use many different kinds of formatting features as well as inserting both links and images.

Related Item(s)

Here you can browse through the site and select specific items of content.  These will show in a table at the bottom of your article called "Related Content".

When first creating your article, it is usually best to fill out the title and description and then click on save.  The steps you follow next depend on how complicated your article will be and what template you want to use.

Article Templates

Article Views

As you create your article, or if you go  back to edit it, you will notice several links at the top of the edit form:  These are different views of the article that allow you to include additional elements to your article that will appear in a pre-arranged location.

Default

This is the ordinary view of the article -- it lets you enter the regular features as described above in "Creating Your Article".

Files

This view lets you add downloadable files to your article (like PDF or program files).  We currently do not support file downloads, so this view isn't much use.

Images

This view allows you to insert images into your article in pre-arranged locations.  The exact placement of the images depends on the article template you have chosen.

Links

This view allows you to insert links to other content in your article.  The links will appear in a table at the end of the article.  Each link will have a title and a description.  While this is very similar to the Related Items(s) in the Default view, it is actually a separate table.  The Links table will appear first, followed by Related Item(s).  Related Items only show the title for each link.

Each time you add items to your article in one of the views, you need to click save before you go on to another view.

Templates

Click on the templates tab at the top of your article.  This will show you the various templates (article layouts) available to you.  They differ from each other in how they arrange images on the page.  The templates tab lets you set which template you want used whenever you create a new article.  You can also change the template that an article uses at any time by clicking on the display tab.  It will show you which template is currently being used, and allow you to select another one.

Submitting Your Article

When you first create your article, its state will be private.  This means that only you (and the site managers) can see your article.  Once you change the state to visible, then others can see and read the article, but it will not yet be indexed by the site.  So it won't be listed when visitors click on the articles tab.  You must change your article to visible before submitting it for publication.  You should also make sure that all the links and images contained in the article are also visible.

The next step is to submit your article for publication. You can submit your article by clicking on the state: tab and selecting submit.  This will change the state of your article to pending, which is similar to visible, but it also means that the article is waiting for a reviewer to check the article and publish it.  If for some reason the article can not be published, the reviewer will reject the article (which puts it back to visible) and either send you an email or put a note in the object history log to  let you know what needs to be done so it can be published.  The main objectives of reviewers are to ensure that the article is constructed properly (all its links work, its pages and images are visible, etc) and that it be fitted with suitable keywords so that it will be found in the correct places by the site search buttons.

Articles can take more time to put together than other types of content, so keeping track of state (private, visible, pending, published) is a little more important.  In the end, however, they can make a giant contribution to the site's usefulness as a source of information.