Add a news or blog article using Page Builder

Traditionally users have added content to Joomla using the Joomla Editor (see this article here for instructions on how to do that).

There is however a better way, to create much more complex and engaging looking articles, using our amazing and easy to use Page Builder tool.

Here's how to get started.

1. First of all please send a request to the Big Front Door team to enable the Page Builder article integration on your site. This may not be enabled by default.

2. Go to the admin panel of your site, this is your website URL followed by /administrator so for example if my website was https://www.xyz.com my admin URL would be at https://www.xyz.com/administrator

3. Login using the username and password given to you by Big Front Door. If you don't have a login please get in touch via email to support@bigfrontdoor.com and we will create an account for you.

4. Click on Content, Articles

5. Click the Green "New" button to create a new article

6. The panel editor opens like this;

The default Joomla Editor is selected, but we don't want to choose that in this case. Click to highlight "SP Page Builder" instead.

7. Now use Page Builder to build your article. It’s a much more powerful than the basic Joomla Editor.

 Click the blue button to add a row, you can then choose how to layout your row in terms of a grid, but for most article purposes just choose the first option to have a single row full span across the page;

Now you have your basic row, you can click the “Addon” link to add elements to your row.

Elements might be text, images, videos, or whatever. There are DOZENS to choose from!

 Text Block will be the most common so let’s say we add one of those. Click Text Block and add your contents and title. Just leave font sizes and weights blank and let the website style sheet deal with that itself when published.

 Then you might want to add an image. Click the Addon button again and choose Image then upload your image, make sure this is reasonably big, 1300px wide would be about right, but for consistency just try and make sure all your pictures are the same width, it looks so much neater. Use Canva to prepare your images if you don’t have any desktop software like Photoshop. Canva is free and really powerful. 

Just choose Select Image then upload your image and select it to insert into a new row under your text.

You can then build your whole article in blocks of text, images, and any other widgets you want to add in so it might look like this;

8. Having built your article as you wish you can then just proceed with the standard publishing considerations, same as with any other article. These are as follows....

9. On the right hand panel choose the Category for your content. If you have a news page and a blog page the category you choose will determine which section of the website your article will appear.

10. Ensure the Status is set to "Published" if you want the article to appear live on your site once saved. Otherwise flick the switch to unpublished to save a draft of your content.

11. You can click the Publishing Tab at the top of the page to edit the time the article will appear and also sent a time for it to automatically un-publish itself if the content is time sensitive. You can also change the author name in here and provide search engine related information.

12. Finally you can click "Images and Links" and upload a poster image for your article. For help in creating a nice poster image please refer again to this article in our helpdesk

Once you've created a nice poster image simply upload it to Intro Image and Full Article Image sections in the Images and Links tab in the Article editor.  Just click the Select button and upload the image from your computer to the website. This image is entirely optional but will appear in lists of articles on your blog page or wall on the website.

13. Finally just choose "Save and Close" to publish your content!