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

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

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

1. You have to convert users into Publishers. Regular (registered) users do not have the right to create articles. You have to make them editors manually. This might work for some website concepts, but for most an automation would be welcome.

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

3. Administrators 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 an article-based website. For example, the whole concept of mosimage is simply an annoyance for a regular user, as no sane webmaster would allow any user to upload media content to their server. Also, the whole concept of image embedding that Joomla uses is not very intuitive for the first time user.

7. The most annoying part of the entire Article Management process is the Joomla approval system. By default, there is no way to filter unpublished content or even have the latest articles submitted first. Imagine that you already have hundreds of user-submitted articles and about 10 submitted per day. To find them and verify the content, you have to search after the title or somehow narrow down the list.

8. There is no way to have a reject, edit and republish workflow. That means if your user posts an article that they later reject, there is now a mechanism to ensure that the user receives feedback on their mistakes so that they can post it and resubmit it. This is a major flaw in the article concept of any reputable article publishing website.

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

We search various resources in hopes of finding a comprehensive solution to our problems. We were only able to find sparse components that solve some of the problems, but not in the way we expected:

JA Submit and Ninja Simple Submit – ninjoomla.com

– simplifies the shipping process

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

– Eliminates some of the confusing errors that Joomla throws at the user without knowing it.

my content

– Allows users to edit their previous submissions

– Allows users to unpublish their content.

– Allows users to submit in any section

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

– The installation of this component went smoothly, just like a normal Component. Then we made a Menu (shown 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 in it (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 interesting feature that we discovered and that proves to be very useful for us webmasters who do not want our web pages to become a link farm – is the limitation of the number of anchors in an article and separately in the Resource Box. In this way we ensure that users do not submit articles with many links without having to reject them. They just can’t send them.

– We were also pleasantly surprised by the ability to limit HTML tags, a feature that removes all tags in addition to the allowed ones. As we discussed with the authors, all “script” tags are automatically removed from your settings. This is a must have security feature.