Front-end Content Management in Joomla!
If you have ever worked with the front end content management workflow in the default Joomla! system, you will appreciate that, straight out of the box, it is not as user-friendly as you might like it to be (indeed, some might say that is a generous description!). Nonetheless, it remains a powerful tool when properly configured — and when the team using it is adequately trained.
This article is excerpted from Ric Shreves’ upcoming title, the Joomla! Bible, from Wiley & Sons. That book is due for publication in early November and can be pre-ordered directly from the publisher at www.wiley.com. Watch this site across the coming months as we preview more from this new title. This article orignally appeared on the author’s site,RicShreves.net.
From a workflow perspective, one of the most frustrating limitations of the front end content management system is the lack of an effective, configurable notifications and tracking system. The more complex your content structures are, the more significant this limitation becomes.
The problem is purely a practical one: As Authors contribute Articles, the Editors have to be notified, then the Editors have to find the contributed Articles and edit them. Once the Articles are edited, the Editors need to notify the Publisher who again has to find the Articles and publish them.
While relying on notifications is fine up to a point, if you want another way to add some more certainty to the process and make it easier to deal with once the Editors and Publishers are actually working inside the system, you may want to consider the following – it’s one way I’ve found that seems to improve on the default approach.
Basically, the essence of this approach involves the creation of a Content Section and two Content Categories that are specifically for the use of the front-end content management team. Here’s how to set it up:
1. Create a new Section, name it “Submissions.”
2. Set the Access Level for the Section named “Submissions” to Special.
3. Create two new Categories inside the new Section. Name these two new Categories “To be Edited” and “To be Published.”
4. Next, create a new Menu Item on the User Menu. Select the Menu Item Type toCategory List Layout. Name the new Item “To be Edited,” and select in the Basic Parameters the Category “To be Edited.”
5. Finally, create another new Menu Item on the User Menu. Select the Menu Item TypeCategory List Layout. Name the new Item “To be Published,” and select in the Basic Parameters the Category “To be Published.”
All the tools are in place, now you need to instruct your team on how to use them.
- Instruct the Authors to assign all new Articles to the Category named “To be Edited.”
- Instruct the Editors to check the “To be Edited” Menu Item each time they log in. Once they complete their edits on the pending Articles, the Editors must re-assign the Articles to the Category named “To be Published.”
- Instruct the Publishers to check the “To be Published” Menu Item every time they log in. The Publishers can then assign the pending Articles to the proper Sections and Categories and publish the Articles.
This approach has two main advantages. First, it makes the editing process easier to manage, as all the Articles appear in the same place and move logically from station to station in the workflow. Second, you gain the ability to set a specific template to the entire front-end content management work flow by associating that template with front end content management Menu Items. (For example, a nice wide template makes it easier to use the editing window, and a lightweight, clean template without unnecessary graphics or module assignments can speed your work.)
While this is not the only way to crack this problem, it’s easy to set up and simple to remember and train against. Have you found another solution? If so, please share it using the comment controls on this article.
Lead analyst Ric Shreves states “we were surprised by the high number of partially or completely abandoned Pages and Profiles. While perhaps some of these are simply temporarily inactive, that distinction rather begs the point, as part of the appeal of social media is the immediacy and responsiveness.”
In the early days of Facebook it was possible for anyone to create a Fan Page using a brand name. Last year, Facebook (finally) recognized that allowing people to create unauthorized pages using other peoples’ brands was not an acceptable practice and they took steps to reduce the problem. (Very small steps, but steps nonetheless!) The first, and arguably least effective, approach was to add a disclaimer and have users certify that they had the authority / right / permission to create the page using the brand name. Facebook did not, however, go back to the people who had already created Fan Pages and push them for such assurances, thereby leaving a number of misleading profiles in place.
The screenshot at right shows what is occurring in that Group. At least one member is using the Group to promote pornographic imagery. If an unwary visitor clicks on the circled users profile, they are taken to a page filled with pornography. Disney, though neither the owner nor the manager of the Group, suffers from the lack of oversight by the Group owner and has no real recourse. The situation seems foreseeable to us: The brand has failed to control its presence on the channel and has left itself open to abuse.
The new profile, named WotifG2G (seen at right), covers all the activity outside of Australia and replaces several country-specific Twitter profiles, for example, the WotifUAE and the WotifAmericas Profiles seen below. Wotif has left up the old Twitter profiles — at least for the time being — and is using them to steer existing Followers and newcomers into the new G2G profile (see, collage at bottom).
Other firms who have spread themselves too thinly, or who now find that brand control is an issue, would do well to learn from Wotif’s exercise. It may be a bit painful, but the short-term pain is offset by the long-term advantages of improving control over your message and reduced overhead.
Alila employs a similar but slightly different strategy. Rather than building Fan Pages and profiles for each of the properties in their portfolio, they have centered their social media approach on product lines. The Alila Hotels product receives separate treatment from the Alila Villas product line. All hotel properties are dealt with in the Alila Hotels profiles; all villa properties are dealt with under the Alila Villas profiles.
The example at left shows a page spammer in action. Shamelessly, he repeatedly posts his message and (not one, but two!) email contacts. To give him his due, what he lacks in creativity he clearly makes up for in persistence, posting again and again his promotional message on this neglected Fan Page. The page administrator here seems oblivious to what’s happening. From the date stamps, you can see that the messages have been on the site for multiple days and at one point the administrator was active on the Page after the first round of messages, but did nothing to remove them.
In this example, the spammers have used the Fan Photos option to upload a variety of messages. The top row shows a (doubled) snapshot of an article from the Malaysia Airlines in-flight magazine. The poster is complaining that the facts in the article are incorrect and that the airline is culturally insensitive. While the use of the Fan Photos to raise an issue about something published by the airline is not necessarily something you would want to discourage, you probably don’t want to it to be addressed in this manner. Worse yet, the bottom row of photos shows an example of the sort of things you would definitely want to block — in this case the spammer has uploaded an advertisement for their system for making money online 
with social media (see, detailed view).
Page jacking can also take a more aggressive form, providing a forum for people to air grievances against your brand or product and turning your Fan Page into a negative publicity weapon aimed directly at you and your Fans, as we see in the next example.
Again, the administrator of this page needs to take remedial steps to get things under control and to respond to this. As it stands now, the only voices being heard on this Fan Page are those of the critics.
