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Editing Articles

Opening an article — new, local, or downloaded from a site — takes you to the editor.

Nothing is written to your machine when an article opens. Save is what creates a local article the first time, and Publish saves before it sends.

Title, alias and body

The Title field is at the top, with the Alias — the last part of the article's URL — below it. When you leave the title field, an empty alias is filled in from the title; one you typed yourself is never overwritten, because an alias that has already been published should not change underneath an article. The button beside the field regenerates it from the current title whenever you ask, and that one always overwrites.

The alias follows the same rule your site does, including whether Unicode characters survive; see Sites for the setting that decides that.

Below them is the article body, edited as formatted text. What you write is stored as HTML. A picture you insert is kept on this machine, inside Grafida, until you publish.

Typing / in the body opens a menu of formatting commands — headings, lists, inline code, a preformatted block, a quote, the read more separator, an image, a link and a table. Keep typing to narrow it down.

The formatting toolbar carries undo and redo, block and style pickers, the usual character formatting, alignment, lists and indentation, Remove formatting, the read more button, a link button and an image button. The menu bar above it adds the rest — Edit, View, Insert, Format, Tools and Table — including the word count and HugeRTE's own keyboard-shortcut help under Tools.

The read more separator

The dashed-line button on the toolbar inserts a read more separator, shown in the body as an orange dashed rule. Everything above it becomes the article's intro text — what a Joomla site shows in a category listing or on the front page — and everything below it is the rest, shown once a reader opens the article. An article can only have one, and the button says so if there is already one in place.

Grafida recognises Joomla's own spelling of the marker as readily as its own, so an article downloaded from the site keeps its split.

Editing the HTML source

Edit HTML Source, on the row of buttons above the editor rather than on the formatting toolbar inside it, opens the article's markup as plain text and fills the whole screen. There is no swipe to dismiss it — a downward swipe over scrolling text is not a gesture anyone makes on purpose, and here it would throw away markup you had just typed by hand.

The markup is coloured to help you read it. That colouring is a scanner, not a validator: it will happily colour something a browser would refuse, and past a certain length it stops colouring the text at all, though the text stays perfectly editable either way. A row of keys above the keyboard adds <, >, /, =, ", &, ;, {, } and a tab, because each of those is two taps on a software keyboard otherwise.

Save writes from inside the source screen, and so does Ctrl+S or Cmd+S. Done applies your edits and returns you to the visual editor; Cancel asks before it throws them away.

Important

What you type here is stored exactly as you typed it. Nothing tidies it, reformats it, or runs it through an HTML parser — beyond what the Close HTML tags for me setting inserts as you type, see Settings. That is the whole reason this screen exists: for markup a parser mishandles.

The visual editor does not make the same promise. It rewrites markup as part of how it works, so a source edit survives Save and Publish untouched only until you next edit the article in the visual editor — after that, the article is whatever the visual editor makes of it, and unusual markup may come back slightly differently spelled. If a piece of markup has to stay exactly as you wrote it, make that edit last, or keep working in the source editor from then on.

Making room to write

The row of buttons above the editor carries Edit HTML Source, the file menu, Save, and — once the article has been saved once — Publish and Delete. Four toggles sit at its left and hand the screen back:

  • Show or hide the title and alias collapses the two fields at the top, which are usually the first thing you fill in and the last thing you look at.
  • Show or hide the formatting toolbar hides the editor's toolbar band.
  • Show or hide the editor menu bar hides the menus above it.
  • Wrap the formatting toolbar onto several rows, or scroll it on one switches the toolbar between one scrolling row and as many rows as it needs to show every button at once.

None of the four is remembered between articles. Every article opens the same way, with the title shown and the toolbar and menu bar hidden.

The Inspector

Everything about the article other than its text lives in the Inspector, a panel below the body that you open and close.

  • Category, Access, Language and Status.
  • Tags — type a name and press Enter or comma to add it. A name that matches one of the site's existing tags is stored with that tag's own spelling, so typing joomla on a site that has Joomla does not create a duplicate. A name that matches nothing is marked New and is created on the site when you publish.
  • Created by Alias — a name to credit instead of the real author. Leaving it empty credits the real author, and clearing it really does clear it on the site.
  • Meta description and Keywords.
  • Images — the Intro image and the Full article image, each with a preview, alt text, a "this image is decorative" tick, and a caption and class. Browse… opens the picture picker; Clear removes the picture.
  • Custom Fields — whatever fields your site's category defines, each with a control that suits its type. A field of a type Grafida cannot edit is still listed by name, under Unsupported fields (not editable), so you know it exists. Its value is kept exactly as it came from the site and sent back untouched.

Note

The category, access level, language and status lists come from Grafida's local copy of the site's metadata. If a value in the article is not in that copy, it is kept and shown as it is rather than silently replaced with the first item on the list. Reload metadata, on the Articles screen, refreshes the copy.

Save, Publish and Delete

  • Save writes the article to this machine.
  • Publish saves first and then sends it to the site — see Publishing.
  • Delete Local Article removes it from this machine. It never touches the article on the site, and it appears only once the article has actually been saved.
  • File opens the export, replace and Markdown-import actions — see Drafts and Files.

Leaving the editor with unsaved changes always asks first, whichever way you tried to leave — including the Android back gesture.

Saving does not restart the editor, so your undo history and the position of the cursor survive it.