Community Magazine 
In our previous article about writing for the Joomla Community Magazine we explained how you can become a writer for the JCM, the three ways you can write (submit directly or share a Google doc first, or write as a guest author) and, very briefly, how to submit your article. In this article we show you how to do that step by step.
Submit a new article
Once you have an author account on the JCM website , you can submit your article. For that you need to be logged in. After logging in, on the homepage, in the right sidebar, you see a small menu, like this one:
Click New Article.
Adding the title
The first thing you need to do is add the title for your article.
Then click Next and the editor will open.
Type or paste your text in the large text area. If you copy or import the content from Google Docs or Microsoft Word, you may get additional formatting in your text, such as spans (Google, for instance, adds “span style = “font-weight:400;”).
You can prevent this by clicking the Paste as text icon in the tool bar:
This way you ensure that the look and feel of your article is consistent with the other articles and the website itself and will allow readers to have a great user experience while reading your article on different devices.
Adding images
You may have noticed that all articles in the Joomla Community Magazine get a cover image. As an author, you don’t have to do anything for that, we’ll create that for you (isn’t that wonderful?). Unless you interview someone: in that case we need a pic of your interviewee so we can create the cover image from that. Therefore, in case of interviews (like “Meet a Joomler”), you should ask your interviewee to provide a great image of them in a suitable format (minimum 500 x 500px, doesn’t have to be square, but those are the minimum sizes), so that our Creative Team would be able to compose a stunning cover image for your article.
Do you have screenshots or other images you want to show in your article? Insert them using CMS Content -> Media
You can now upload images or pick an existing image. Each author has their own images folder, so everything you ever uploaded will be there.
Bonus tip #1: do you have a lot of images in your article? Upload them all at once!
Bonus tip #2: did you start with a Google doc and have you pasted your screenshots or other images in this doc? In your Google doc, go to File -> download -> web page and you’ll get a pretty neat folder with all the images in it.
And we probably don’t have to tell you this, but still: only use images that are free to use or screenshots you took yourself. Make sure to respect other people’s privacy and copyright while working with images.
Saving your article
So. You’ve done the hardest part! But are you done? Well, that depends: maybe you’re not sure if your wording is right, maybe you want to replace one or two images, maybe you had to cook dinner all of a sudden and couldn’t finish everything before that… Whatever the case, if you’re not entirely finished with the article, you can click the Save & Close button below your article. This saves your article as Draft and you can still work on it.
Are you happy with the article? Then it’s time for the final step: submit it for approval. For that, you click Submit for approval, the green button below your article. After that, there’s no way back 🙂. One of the JCM editors will look at it. If it gets approved, you get a notification. If we have questions or want to discuss anything with you, we’ll contact you. Once your article is approved, it gets scheduled for publication. You get a notification for that as well.
Where to find your articles
You'll find an overview of your articles by clicking on My Articles in the sidebar menu.
On top of the list, you'll see your drafts, below that you'll see your published articles.
At the moment, authors can't make changes to their published articles yet. But no worries, we've got your back: if you discover a typo or something else that needs changing, just ask one of your editors and we'll happily do it for you.
This article covers submitting articles to the Joomla Community Magazine. For this to happen, you need an account on this website, with author rights. Read all about that here: https://magazine.joomla.org/all-issues/january-2023/how-to-write-for-the-joomla-community-magazine
Comments