To begin the program, we'll go to the web address of the Max Articles system on your website. This will almost always be in the form of:

http://www.mydomain.com/maxarticles/index.php

After entering your userid and password, you come to the "Login Profile" of the Max Articles system. This is the main operating page. Here you can change the profile.  But the most significant part of the page is the Manage Your Articles button.

Managing Articles

The first time you come here, you will have no articles added yet. So let's look at the rest of the elements of this page later.  For now, just hit the Submit Article button.

Entering Articles

When you do, you’ll see a page that asks for:

• Title
• Author
• Category
• Article Text

Let’s go over these.

Title is the title of your article.

And that’s it. Now just hit the Submit New Article button.  You'll see a page which is a review what you've entered, with any error messages if the submission was not correct (for example, title missing or article too long.)

When the article is successfully submitted, it will be added to the database of articles. And you'll see this message:

You have successfully submitted your article. It has been sent to the editor,
and will be reviewed soon. Until accepted, your article status will say Pending
and not appear in the main list of articles. When accepted, your article status will
indicate that it is Verified. And will be viewable by visitors. Thank you!

Meaning that your article will not appear in the list of articles on the website -- until the website owner has had a chance to review the article and Verify it.

Next step here is to return to the Articles Manager.

List of Articles You've Added

And what do you see? You see your new article in the list of article. Only one is there, if this is the first article you’ve entered, but the list will expand as you add more articles.

Let’s look at this list:

It shows you the Title, Author, Category and Status. When you click on the word Preview on the same line as the article Title, it shows you the article, just as it would appear on the main articles listing. When you click on the word Modify on the same line as the article Title, it takes you to a screen that looks just like the Add Articles screen. Here’s where you can make changes to the article, if you need to. You can also choose to Delete the article completely, if you wish. You would put a check mark in the Delete column, and then click the Delete Checked Articles button at the bottom of the list. (It’s unlikely that you’ll want to do this, very often.)

Note that word Title at the very top of the list in the colored row can be clicked on. If you do so, it will show you the list sorted by title. The same is true of the words Author and Category. You can sort the list by these, too.

Now suppose you have lots of articles. Say you have 80 articles. Or even more. You probably don’t want the whole list on one page. So the list is "page-inated." This means you only see a certain number at one time, say 30. You can hit the Next and Back words, in order to see more of the list. This number is configurable. You can set it to be whatever you like.

Verifying an Article: If you are the system administrator (meaning you login as admin,) you will see that the Status column is linked. The words Pending or Verified are active hyper-links.  If you click on the word Pending, that is how you Verify an article submission.  The word changes to Verified.

You can also do the reverse. If you click on the word Verified, it will change to Pending. Thus, it is a toggle.  Note: when you verify an article, it is automatically added to the page called 'allarticles.html'  This is a special HTML page that is created by the system, so that search engines can easily index the article titles.

Very important:  users can login and see the articles that they have added, and only their own articles.  But the administrator can view ALL the articles that have been submitted by everyone -- in a long list.  And thus Verify, modify / delete, etc. The administrator is the person who has the login userid of 'admin'.  Thus, it is important that you signup with the admin userid as soon as the system is installed. Then, when you go to the Articles Manager, you will see all the articles that have been entered in the system, by everyone.

Now, let’s look at the operation of the main Articles Listing.