Most of your Joomla content is in the form of articles and knowing how to edit and update articles is essential if you want to keep your content fresh. Here's how to do it.

There are two ways to access articles so you can edit them, if you have administrator privileges you can log in to the admin back-end and edit; that's what we're going to be doing here. So log in and select articles on the left of  the control panel or select Content > Articles from the menu at the top of the screen. 

What you now see is the Article Manager which lists all of the articles on your website. If you can't see the article you're looking for it may be on another screen - the Article Manager displays 20 articles to a page by default. To see more articles either use the navigation buttons at the bottom of the screen to go to the next page or increase the number of articles displayed using the drop-down menu in the top right of the screen. You can also use the search box to find specific articles or click the Search Tools button to filter articles by category, author and other parameters.

To edit an article click on its title in the Article Manager or click the check box on its left and click the Edit button at the top of the screen.

You'll now see the Article Edit screen. The content is displayed in the edit window - here you'll see your article text and pictures, though it may not look exactly as is does on the front-end (public-facing) of your website.

If you simply want to edit the text in your article all you need to do is select it and overwrite it with the new text. Within the edit panel you can cut copy and paste, just as you would in any other text editing application.

At the top of the edit panel there's a toolbar which you can use to style text. For example to add a heading use the drop-down menu that says Paragraph where you'll find a range of (usually) six different sized headings. 

To insert a link first highlight the text you want to link then click the Insert Link button on the toolbar. You can type in the URL (the web address of the link) in the URL field of the Insert Link panel, but it's usually more reliable to copy and paste it from the address bar of your web browser. The link should begin with http:// You can add an optional title or leave the Title field blank. If you leave the Target field on the default None value the link will open on the same window of the browser. Select New Window from the drop-down menu if you want the link to open in a new window (n.b. this is generally not a good idea).

If you're making major edits don't wait until you've finished before saving your work. Click the green Save button at the top left of the screen frequently to save your work as you progress. When you're finished, click the save and close button.

To see the results of your work click the Preview link in the top right corner of the screen and navigate to the article page in the front-end of your website. If you have a lot of editing to do you may find it helpful to work in two browser tabs - one for the back-end and one to preview your changes in the front-end. Once you've made some edits and saved them in the back-end, switch to the front-end tab and refresh the page (click the reload button on the left of the address bar or press F5 on your keyboard.

 You can find out more about editing articles in Joomla at joomla.org

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