Several people have asked me how they could submit articles to this website in our
Articles section. I figured it was time that I got around to penning a forum topic on exactly how to author and upload or submit an article to this website. So let's get started!
Step 1: Submission Link, Starting the Process
The first step is to click the link in the Articles section that says "Submit Articles". You can either do this from the Article home page shown in the following screen capture, or from any category that you are viewing.
Step 2: Choosing a Category
If you are already in a category when you click the Submit Articles link it will pre-choose that category for you from the drop down list and you only need to click the Submit button. If not, you will be given the entire category list drop down as shown in the following photo. You MUST select the appropriate category from the drop down list and then click the Submit button to go on to the next step.
Step 3: Authoring the Article
Authoring an article is a little different from authoring a message in the forums in that you don't get the nice WYSIWYG editor, instead you have plain text boxes and some buttons, first let's look at the article submission form and then we'll examine each item on the form.
Starting at the top notice that your username has been filled in for you as well as the category that you've chosen. If either of those is incorrect, please go back and start over.
Product Manufacturer: Please fill in whomever makes the product you are authoring an article about. This could be something like "Porsche" or "Bilstein" if it is a car part of modification.
Product Model Name: Please fill in the name of the particular item, for example if we had chosen Porsche for the Manufacturer maybe the part is the factory
sports exhaust so you'd enter "
Sports Exhaust" or something similar.
Product Images: Next there are 5 boxes available for the direct upload of images of the product from your computer to the website. I always suggest uploading at least 1 photo here because it will show up in the category and item index next to your article and make your article show up on the Articles section home page under recent articles. Failure to upload even 1 photo here may mean that you article is seen and read by a lot fewer people.
Step 3a - Uploading Pictures of Product
To upload anywhere from 1 to 6 photos of the item that will appear in the index and in the header of your article simply click the Browse button which will cause your computer to pop up a directory listing of your computer. Navigate to where the photos are and select the one you want to upload and click the Open or OK button as shown in this following screen capture:
Repeat this process for up to 6 photos. I recommend that your photos be no larger than 1024x768 if you are going to upload multiple photos, otherwise the submission process "could" time out. It is OK if the photos you upload directly are also ones that you want to use in the body of your article. I again encourage you to upload at least one photo using this process.
Step 3b - Article Body
The Article Body is the main area where you type in your Article. This can be text, text with forum codes such as
bold and you can also include photos inline using two different methods.
Plain Text - This will be the bulk of your article, just typing away gives you good ole plain text.
Forum Codes - You can use any of the markup codes used in the forum in your article as well. The only difference is that you don't have the WYSIWYG editor so you have to do it MANUALLY, that means typing in the beginning tag and ending tag for each forum code you want to use.
*** TIP - Here's a side trick you can use. You can author your article as a message in the forums and post it. Then go back and EDIT your forum posting and copy/paste the text and codes into the Article Body box. Then delete your message in the forum. This is a round about way of using the better editor in the forum as opposed to manually entering the forum codes in he Article Body text box.
Inline Images - People want to see what you are doing, so your article is likely to have or need inline images. You type some text, insert an image (much as I am doing in this forum posting) and then continue on with more text. There are 2 ways to insert images into the Artcle Body.
1) Manually typing the image tags before and after a valid image URL.
2) Copy/Pasting the BB Code from a Gallery photo into the Article Body.
I tend to prefer #2 since I want the photos to "live" in the Gallery anyway. As a refresher on how to upload photos to our Gallery see this message topic:
How to use the Gallery / Upload Pictures
Here is a screen capture that explains in more detail in the Article Body how to use either method 1 or 2 to insert an inline image.
Here is another screen capture that shows me looking at a photo in the Articles section of the Gallery and copying the BB Code to be used back in the Article Body via copy/paste.
Notice in the next screen capture that I have pasted in the BB Code from the gallery photo.
At this point after you have finished typing in all the text and including all the photos you have one more option before submitting your article. You can choose to have any responses to your article emailed to you. This is a good method to alert you that other members may have compliments, problems with, or questions about the article you submitted. After selecting Yes or No then click the Submit button at the bottom of the form.
Please note that if you have chosen to upload 6 photos it may take a little while until you get the article confirmation message.
Step 4 - Editing an Article
What if you make a mistake? What if you submitted an article and later noticed an error and want to fix it? That's easy, simply go to your Article and click the Edit Article link shown in the next photo. You will be taken back to your article using the editor form you originally used to submit the article and you can make any changes and submit again and your article will be updated.
There you go, now you should have everything you need to be able to submit a new article to our Articles section of the website!
Enjoy!
Until 
Linear Mode
