This article assumes basic knowledge of Joomla. A working installation of Joomla is required.

Let’s say you need, or just want, to create a site like EzineArticles or something similar. If you are interested in using a more generic CMS, and not a script targeting an article site, you might consider using Joomla. That is always a good choice.

If you tried to use Joomla as it is, with the default Article Management, you will soon feel its limitations. There are some flaws that will prevent you from running your site as a professional article publishing web service.

1. You have to make users Editors. Regular users (Registered) do not have the right to create Articles. You have to manually make them Editors. This might work for some website concepts, but for most an automation would be welcome.

2. Users cannot see your submitted content. There is no list of shipped items.

3. Admins do not receive any email notification when a new article is submitted.

4. Users do not receive an email notification when their articles are approved and published

5. Users do not receive a message or notification when their Article is NOT approved.

6. The article submission interface is confusing and quite complicated for novice users and users who are not used to the Joomla interface. There are some features that are not necessary in a regular article-based website. For example, the whole concept of mosimage is just an annoyance to a normal user, as no webmaster in their right mind would allow any user to upload media to their server. Also, the whole concept of embedding images that Joomla uses is not very intuitive for the first time user.

7. The most annoying part of the entire article management process is Joomla’s approval system. By default, there is no way to filter unpublished content or even have the latest articles submitted first. Imagine that you have hundreds of articles already submitted by users and about 10 submitted per day. To find them and check the content, you need to search for the title or narrow down the list in some way.

8. There is no way to have a reject, edit and republish workflow. That means that if your user publishes an article that they later reject, there is now a mechanism to ensure that the user gets feedback on the error from her so that she can publish the article and resubmit it. This is a major flaw in the article concept of any reputable article publishing website.

Seeking to overcome these deficiencies of Joomla, we tried to find a set of components that allow you to complete these tasks and use the standard Joomla Article Management. We do not test core hacks or the like as these are difficult to maintain in the latest version of Joomla and could also interfere with other components that are vital for a good Joomla website (Community Builder, etc.)

We searched various resources in hopes of finding an integrated solution to our problems. We were only able to find scattered components that solve some of the problems, but not in the way we expected:

JA Send and Ninja Simple send – ninjoomla.com

– simplifies the shipping process

– allows unregistered submission (not our goal), but overcomes the problem of having users register manually.

– Eliminate some of the confusing errors that Joomla unknowingly throws at the user

my content

– Allows users to edit their previous shipments

– Allows users to unpublish their content.

– Allow users to submit in any section

Item Factory Manager – http://www.thefactory.ro

– The installation of this component went smoothly, like a normal component. Then we made a Menu (displayed only for registered users) with some links to the main functionalities of this component. We define “My Articles”, “Submit new article” and “my Resource Box”

– An interesting feature that the component introduces in our workflow is the “resource box”. This is a small signature box that only allows limited HTML code (Anchor and Breaks only – ay br). This is a user information box that will be attached to your submitted articles. This way, users save their information and backlinks once and can focus on the article submission process.

– Another cool feature we discovered that proves to be very useful for us webmasters who don’t want our web pages to become a link farm is the limitation of the number of anchors in one article and separately in the resource box . This way we make sure that users don’t submit articles with many links without having to reject them. They just can’t send them.

– We were also pleasantly surprised by the possibility of HTML tag limiting, a feature that removes all tags other than those allowed. As we discussed with the authors, all “script” tags are automatically removed regardless of your settings. This is a must-have security feature.