Editing articles

This article contains notes and tips on editing articles on the e-Atlas. This article should be read in conjunction with the Publishing articles page. It explains some of the quirks of the editing system and more detail about some of the fields that need to be set when creating an article.

Fields

Title: The title should be short and descriptive. In general it should be less than 60 characters in length. The title of the page is very important for search engines. If the title of the page matches or contains words from the search phase then the page is much more likely to be on the first page of a search result. For this reason where possible use language that people might use to look your content.

Topics: This selection list specifies where the article will be filed in the "Browse by: Topic" navigation system. High level articles should generally be filed in upper levels of the topic structure. In general it is easy to change this later on if you make a mistake.

Institution: This field corresponds to the institution that developed the content. This is used by the "Browse by: Institution" navigation. This field has auto-completion so as you start to type it will show existing matching records.

Funding Program: This corresponds to who funded the work (it usually has more relevance for datasets and projects than articles). It is used by the "Browse by: Funding" navigation.

Preview Image: This image is displayed in the top left at 200x200 pixels in size at the start of an article. It is important that all articles have a preview image so that they display well on the front page. The image should be an image that summarizes the content of the article in some way.

Body: This is where the main text goes and the bulk of the work. You can create an article from scratch using this editor, or copy text from a different source.

he editor has a few quirks that you need to consider.

Copy and Pasting from Word can be hazardous if done wrong as word generates HTML that is full of extra tags that clash with the styling of the web site. For this reason when we add text we want it to be organised as simply as possible. i.e. we only want formating that details the basic structure of the text such as headings, paragraphs, bullets, etc.

To do this reasonably safely copy and entire document and use the "Paste from Word" button (clip board with the Word Logo on it). You will need to still need to fix up some of the headings, marking them as Heading 2, and removing the first heading 1 as this is set by the article title.

Handling images:

Pasting from Word will not upload the images. To do this you need to upload each image to the server, BUT before we do this we must make sure our image filenames are good. There are two reasons for this. The first is that the organisation system for the photos is not that good and so we need to name images so we can work out which articles they are used for (This will be particularly important when we upgrade the image system). The other reason is that Google uses the text in the filenames to assist it in its image search.

Image renaming:

Images should be renamed as follows: NodeId_DescriptiveText.jpg, where the NodeId is the number assigned to the article by the web site content management system (Note: this is only available after saving the article). If you are working on a new article then simply save it and reopen it for editing. The article URL will now be something like: http://eatlas.org.au/node/198/edit where 198 is the NodeId. An example the file name for a the picture of a turtle might be: 198_Green-Sea-Turtle.jpg

Image uploading:

This is done using the "Media" button (has a picture of mountains) on the editor, then use the "Browse Server" button. From here you can use the "Upload" page to add new images, and the "Resize" to shrink images, or "Thumbnails" to create images of standard sizes. If you make any mistakes you can always use the "Delete" to start again. When you have an image you want to add to the article use the "Send to ckeditor" link. You should upload the image in the highest quality available (as we potentially want to create a book in the future) then resize it for use in the article. By default the images are filed in a directory corresponding to your account name.

Image Properties:

After clicking the "Send to ckeditor" link you should be in the Image Properties panel. From here you should set the "Alternative Text" field for the image. This is the text should describe the contents of the image. It is used by screen readers (for vision impaired people) and by Google to understand the content of the image.

Image Link:

If you have an image that is very detailed and you would like to make available a high resolution version of it then use the "Link" tab and set the URL to the high resolution version of the image (using the "Browse Server" button) and set the Target to "New Window" so the image will appear in a new tab.