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The Article Editor
The article editor is the heart of the Big Medium system, allowing even the most non-technical staff to add and edit web pages without knowing HTML.

Big Medium offers an end-run around the website bottleneck. Most organizations depend on one or two overworked webmasters to make any and all changes to the website, including simple text edits. Often this means longer-than-necessary waits for important updates and, for the webmaster, a tedious routine of website maintenance.

The article editor is the heart of the Big Medium system.

With Big Medium's article editor, authors and editors can manage their own content. Photographers and illustrators can add their own images. Managers and publishers can review content before it's published to the live site. And, finally, web professionals can focus on jobs that actually make good use of their skills. Instead of formatting HTML or making small content edits, developers and designers can turn to more engaging projects, creating innovative new designs and exciting new applications for your website.

Meet the article editor

After signing into the Big Medium control panel, the first page you see is always the menu for the article editor. The article editor is where the magic happens, where articles are created, edited and published to your website.

The article editor menu displays a list of all of your website's articles, along with information about each article's publication date, the section(s) where it appears, its author, and its publication status. The publication status indicates whether an article is "on" and published on the public site, or "off" and available to be edited and previewed only from within the Big Medium article editor.

Who can edit articles?

Big Medium is password-protected so that only authorized people can edit your website's content. Each person gets his or her own account and password, along with a "status" that determines what he or she can do within the Big Medium system. There are five levels of account status: administrator, webmaster, publisher, editor and writer. (For more details, see the Big Medium Accounts page).

The account status of your account is displayed at the top of the Big Medium control panel. All five types of accounts can add and edit articles, or webpages, for the site. Only administrators, webmasters and publishers, however, can publish or unpublish articles to and from the live public site, allowing these users to review all articles before they're shared with the public. Writers can add articles but cannot publish them to the live site or edit articles created by others. Editors can edit articles created by others but, like writers, cannot publish articles to the live site.

Edit away...

To edit an existing article, click the headline of that article in the article editor menu, and Big Medium will present you with the article's edit page. Or, to add a new article, click the "New Article" link in the left-column menu of the Big Medium control panel.

The article edit page contains all of the information about each article, including the actual text of the article. To add or edit your site's webpages, all you have to do is edit the form on the edit page, and Big Medium takes care of the rest.

As with all areas of Big Medium, the article edit page includes lots of online help. Clicking on the question-mark icon in each panel of the edit page produces a complete explanation of what each portion of the edit page does.

Required fields and optional fields

You only have to enter three pieces of information to publish a webpage to your site: the article title/headline, the article content, and the website section(s) where you would like the article to appear. The edit panels for these required fields appear at the top of the page and are marked with red asterisks.

Below the required fields, the article edit page offers many optional fields, which allow you to enhance the display of the article and offer a richer depth of information. When you first create a new article, the edit panels for these optional fields are not displayed. To open any of the edit panels for these optional fields, click the button for the option you would like to access, and the edit panel pops open.

For example, to add an author's name and e-mail address to your article, click the "Author Info" button under "Supporting Content." Likewise, to add pullquotes to your article, click the "Pullquotes" button.

Article title/headline
The article's headline and also the text for all links that point to the article page.

Article content
Type your text into the provided field, and Big Medium will handle the rest, converting your text into HTML. In addition to this text option, you can instead choose to load a document to offer as a download, to enter a link to another website, or to enter your own html.

Article info
The publication date of the article determines where an article is displayed relative to other articles (the most recent articles are displayed first). The description accompanies links to the article and is also used as a subheadline for the article. The keywords help search engines categorize the webpage. The section indicates where the article where appear on the site.

Author info
The name and e-mail address of the article's author.

Pullquotes
A pullquote is a snippet of text taken from the main text of an article and displayed in the article in large type, as a design element. To add a pullquote, enter its text and the number of the paragraph ("6" for the sixth paragraph) where you would like the pullquote to appear in the article.

Related links
Links to other webpages that you would like to include with this article.

Spotlight promotional image
The homepage and main section pages may "spotlight" an article, giving it a featured place on the page. This image accompanies the link to the spotlight article, creating a high-impact promotion for the featured article. To load the image directly from your hard drive, click the "Browse" button and choose the file to load.

Thumbnail promotional image
Thumbnail images accompany links to articles and are displayed on the homepage and main section pages. As with the spotlight image, you can load the image directly from your hard drive by clicking the "Browse" button and choosing the file to load.

Main article image
The main article image is displayed along with the "page tools" (e-mail this article, printer-friendly page, etc) and may include a caption. Unlike body images (see below), the main article image does not appear within the body of the text. Click the "Browse" button to select an image file from your hard drive.

Article body images
Article body images are displayed within the main body of the article, with the text flowing around them. Click the "Browse" button to select an image file from your hard drive.

Display preferences
The Don't Build Link to Article options tell Big Medium if it shouldn't link to the article in certain places on the site.

Slug name
This optional field determines the file name and web address of the article. You can give it a descriptive name ("manbitesdog") or you can leave it blank, and Big Medium will assign a slug name for you.

WYSIWYG editing

One of the great benefits of using Big Medium is that non-technical people can easily add or edit website content without knowing a thing about HTML. Just cut and paste article text into the "article body content" field, and that's all there is to it. Big Medium converts this plain text into HTML automatically.

With Big Medium's rich-text editor, formatting your text is as easy as using a word processor. Highlight the text to format and click the appropriate button in the editing toolbar. (The rich text editor requires Internet Explorer 5.5 or later in Windows, or a Mozilla-based browser in other operating systems).

One-click editing

One-click editing lets you go directly from any page on your live site to the article editor for that page. So whenever you see website information that needs to be updated or a typo that needs to be corrected, it's just a one-click process to make the change.

When one-click editing is enabled, you can move fluidly between your public website and its behind-the-scenes editing environment. Big Medium places edit icons on each page of your site; click the edit icon, and Big Medium displays the edit page for that article.

One-click edit icons are visible only on the screens of Big Medium users and are not displayed to other website visitors.

You can turn the display on and off for your individual computer by clicking the "one-click editing" link in Big Medium's status bar. For additional security, you're also prompted to enter your user name and password if not already signed into Big Medium.

Your words, your look-and-feel

When Big Medium publishes the article to your website, it uses the information you provide in the article edit page form to create a webpage in your site's unique design. Big Medium essentially pours your words into custom web templates that give your organization complete control over the look-and-feel of the site. (For more information about design templates, see the Section Editor page.)

Also, when you click the "Save" button, Big Medium does much more than simply post the article on your site. The system keeps the big picture in mind, updating your home page and all of your main section pages with links to the new article, making sure that your entire site is fresh and up to date.

The result: All of your website content can be created and edited within the article editor, and you never need to touch HTML to do it.

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