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This article presents some of your options for preparing your article for publication on the FFI PostNuke site.

Previous article in series: Introduction

An Overview Of The Authoring Process

Submitting articles for publication using the FFI PostNuke system is not like conventional web publishing.

With conventional web publishing, you use a program on your computer to create your web pages, and then upload the completed pages to a web server. Some popular programs for creating web pages are Microsoft FrontPage and Macromedia DreamWeaver. These programs let you control the layout of the entire page, so that the web page you see on your computer is the same web page everyone else sees when they go to your website.

With PostNuke, you don't get to design the entire web page, since much of it is generated automatically by the PostNuke system. You only get to create the contents of the article box. You also don't upload your article to the server - you enter your article into a form in your web browser.

Entering your article can either be done by typing the article text directly into the online form (basically, using PostNuke as a word processor), or by pasting text into the online form which you've prepared in advance on your computer. Either way, you'll have the opportunity to preview and edit your article as many times as needed before finally submitting it for publication. Unfortunately, the preview only resembles the way the actual article will look when published, but we'll get into that in another article.

Your article can include most of the text formatting that is supported by your web browser, including bold, italic, underlined, and even combinations of these. You can also change the color of your text.

You can create bullet lists:

• First item.
• Second item.

You can create itemized lists:

1. First item.
2. Second Item.

Your article can contain links to other web pages, or even other locations in your article, such as footnotes. You can divide your article into pages at any point you choose, or you can create a single page of any length.

Your article can also include images.

We have provided an online image gallery where you can upload the images you wish to use with your articles. You can link directly to the images once you have uploaded them to the gallery. You can also link to images which are on other web sites, however, we discourage this since those web sites may not keep those images on their sites forever.

Unless your article is going to consist only of plain text, you will want to include some formatting like described above. In order to do this, you have to include HTML tags in your article text. This isn't nearly as scary as it sounds. HTML tags are simply bits of text which are enclosed between angle brackets, such as <b> and </b>. These two HTML tags are used to start and end a region of text which would be displayed in bold text.

PostNuke offers a "visual editor" called typetool, which is intended to allow you to apply formatting by simply selecting regions of text and clicking on a button, similar to the way that a word processor works. We tried enabling the typetool visual editor for a while, but it works so badly that we disabled it. It doesn't really display your article like it's really going to look to the reader, and it usually generates so many invalid HTML tags that it creates more work than it saves.

"Online" vs. "Offline" Editing

You have two choices when it comes to authoring your article. You can choose to write your article directly in the PostNuke article editing form, called "online" editing. Or, you can choose to write your article on your own personal computer and paste it into the PostNuke article editing form when you're finished. Which method you choose depends on how you prefer to work.

One factor that may affect which method you choose is the limitations imposed by PostNuke on what kind of content your article may contain. PostNuke always uses HTML to format the content of your article. However, PostNuke does not permit every possible type of HTML tag to be used in submitted articles.

For example, PostNuke does not allow any "active content", such as Javascript, in an article. There are, in fact, a long list of HTML tags which PostNuke will not allow. If you happen to use any of these tags in your article then PostNuke will simply ignore the tag, and display it as if it were part of your article's text.

Here's an example. If you tried to use the <div> tag in your article it would end up being displayed like this:

<div>Here is my section text.</div>

The same thing will happen if your HTML tags are not properly formatted. PostNuke is rather strict about the formatting of HTML tags, and will disallow tags which would probably be acceptable to your web browser.

If you are the type of person who likes to take your time writing an article, proofreading and rewriting a lot, then online editing may not be the best choice for you. First of all, the PostNuke article editing environment is not the most user friendly way to create web content. If you spend hours (or even days) creating an article, all it takes is one error in either the PostNuke system or the FFI server, and you could lose your entire article and have to start over again.

The advantage of offline editing is that you can proofread and save your article on your own personal computer. This is especially useful if you plan to submit the article to more than one website.

The disadvantage of offline editing is that you may have to make some extensive markup changes to your article after pasting it into the PostNuke article editing form. This is especially true if you use a web design tool (like Microsoft FrontPage or Macromedia DreamWeaver, or even Microsoft Word) to create the HTML formatted article. All of these editors are likely to produce HTML tags which PostNuke will not accept in your article.

You should read all of the following articles.

• Submitting your article
• Editing articles in HTML

So, get a cup of coffee and relax! Let's learn how to publish articles on FFI!

Next article in series: Submitting your article