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Introducing EasyArticles

Mark

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Thursday, 25 May 2017

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We have been trying to refine the process of authoring in Joomla from a day to day basis and one of the most painful process is editing articles on the front end with proper workflows. Although the ACL in Joomla is pretty robust, it's still isn't suitable for a day to day authoring and publishing process.

EasyArticles approach is to introduce article management and minimalist user interface right on the front end. It will be suitable for blogs, news, or any other content generation that requires a more robust workflow, beautiful composing interface and awesome features. We have combined a decade worth of experience from when we were working with EasyBlog and we were trying to revolutionize the way articles are created.

How EasyArticles Came About

Initially, it started off as an idea for EasyBlog to store it's data into Joomla Articles. As we were working on that, we realize that there were just too many features in EasyBlog that don't exist in the standard articles extension on Joomla. We do not want to end up hacking or modifying any core bits of Joomla article.

With EasyArticles, we have combined a decade's worth of the best composing experience and workflow which we learnt from EasyBlog. It allows site owner who doesn't need a full fledged blog to also be able to enjoy the goodies that are offered in EasyBlog.

Here are some of the cool features that will be rolled out on the initial release of EasyArticles.

Great Authoring workflow

If you are authoring most of the articles by yourself, then Joomla articles would be a match made in heaven. For smaller, medium sized or even larger teams, the authoring workflow is pain to work with.

With the authoring workflow in EasyArticles, moderating or managing these articles would be convenient and painless.

Birds-eye View of Everything

Beautiful Composer

You don't have to be a designer to create great content. This is one of the most important aspects in authoring that many neglected, thinking that their writers are designers or programmers that understand html codes. Writers themselves are not designers and we should not be expecting them to design the article or programmatically inject html codes.

We have heard this many times but it is important to remember that Content Is King. Writers should do what they do best, which is to write or draft great articles so that the site would follow the approach where content is being prioritized over thinking about where to place images, videos or anything else related to designing.

Composing Article

Publishing Article

Media Manager

EasyArticles also comes with the same great media manager that is included in EasyBlog without the other complexity that comes with the blogging system.

In fact, while I am drafting this post with EasyBlog (thankfully!), I couldn't imagine how would anyone would use the stock media manager in Joomla! to compose articles. Certainly, there are tons of great media managers out there but they don't feel as native as composing with the same editor.

Front-end Everything

Have you ever tried to request your writers to manage articles on the front end because you don't want them to worry about how they could access the administration area? I believe most of you tried it and eventually just chose to compose from the administration area.

With EasyArticles, we have streamlined the management of your articles and categories into the front end allowing a more blissful experience while managing all this information.

Articles Management

Create Categories

Category Creation

Subscriptions & Notifications

Users on the site can subscribe and be notified by email in the event a new article is created or modified. This also includes push notifications!

Post Templates

One of the most used and loved feature in EasyBlog was the ease of re-using post templates without having to draft everything from scratch. We have also invented something similar for EasyArticles but with a more robust templating structure.

Not Another Pagebuilder

EasyArticles is not another page builder and it never will be a page builder. There are a ton of page builders available for Joomla already and there is no point reinventing the wheel again.

EasyArticles approach is to simplify your day to day authoring workflow and publishing right from the front end.

Compatibility With Joomla Editors

In order to achieve the minimalistic design in EasyArticles, it will include a built-in editor out of the box. It will also be able to work out of the box with most and if not all of your favorite Joomla editors.

Pricing

The price of EasyArticles will be disclosed when the alpha release is available. Having said that, EasyArticles will be included in all of our bundles.

Yep, it will be FREE to users with an active bundle.

EasyBlog Progress

Rest assured that EasyBlog will still be actively maintained and developed by the team. EasyBlog has tons of features of a full blog and it should be kept that way. We have great ideas coming along with EasyBlog 5.2, including a pretty cool collaboration tool =)

To Wrap Up ...

Joomla! is definitely a great Content Management System and the addition of EasyArticles isn't to replace Joomla articles but rather to complement it. We have loads to add into EasyArticles as we move forward :)

What do you think? Share your thoughts, suggestions, criticism on the comment form below. The team and I would love to hear your thoughts!

Check out EasyArticles

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