Introduction

In this video we'll take a look at all the settings available in Articles Anywhere and how they change the behaviour and functionality of Articles Anywhere.

In the previous videos we have already seen how to install Articles Anywhere and what the basic features are for the free and pro version of Articles Anywhere.

But that is just scratching the surface of what Articles Anywhere can do and how you can use it.

Articles Anywhere is a plugin. Well, actually - as you can see here - 2 plugins. The main System Plugin, and an Editor Button. All the settings, including those to control the editor button, are found in the System Plugin. So let's open that one.

In this video we will be working with the latest version of Articles Anywhere, which is version 8.5.2. And what you see here is a Joomla 3.9.1 setup. If you are using newer versions, things might look a bit different.

And, as you can see, we have the Pro version installed. Some features and settings are only available in the Pro version. I'll mention that when discussing those settings.

All we see here is just a short description of the extension. And on the right here, we have the general plugin settings each plugin has.

The Articles Anywhere specific settings are in these different tabs.

All settings have a short description you can see when hovering over the title. That should give you enough information to know what a setting does.

Now, the default settings are fine for most setups. So you probably don't need to change any. But in some cases you will want to change the default behaviour of Articles Anywhere. Only change settings if you understand what they are for and how they affect the behaviour of the extension.

Behaviour

Speaking of behaviour, we'll start with the 'Behaviour' tab.

These first 3 settings are only available in the Pro version.

By default, when using the {articles} tag, Articles Anywhere will display *all* articles matching our filters. Let's say we have 200 articles in the Animals category. If we then filter our articles by the "Animals" category, it will show all 200 Animals.

{articles category="Animals" limit="3"}
[link][title][/link]
{if even}[image-1 width="150" height="150" class="img-right"]{else}[image-1 width="150" height="150" class="img-left"]{/if}
[introtext]
[readmore]
{/articles}

As we've seen in previous videos, we can change that using the limit attribute in the {articles} tag. But we can also change the default setting here, to only show a maximum of, say, 10 articles by default.

We can also change the default ordering and direction of the ordering here. For instance, we might want to set this to "Start Publishing Date" and in Descending order by default. Ordering settings can also be overruled in the {articles} tag.

The 'Use Ellipsis' setting comes into play when we use the limit options on text data.

{articles category="Animals" separator="<hr>"}
[link][title][/link]
[introtext]{/articles}

For instance, we can let Articles Anywhere output the first 20 words of the introtext.

[introtext words="20"]

It will then only show those 20 words and add these 3 dots after it, to indicate the text is trimmed. If you don't want that for whatever reason, you can switch it off here.

When displaying the full text of an article through Articles Anywhere, you probably want the hits count on that article to increase. If not, you can set this to no.

Media

Now, all options here concern the resizing and handling of images. This is only available in the Pro version of Articles Anywhere.

When we display article images through Articles Anywhere, we can make it automatically resize the image, to make webpages load a lot faster compared to using the original images. The options here control if and how the resizing is done.

When set to 'No', the image will not be automatically resized, and the original image will be used. Except, as you can read here, when we specifically set the resize attribute to true in a specific image data tag.

By default the option is set to 'Standard'. This will resize the images if we set a specific width and/or height in the image data tag that is different to the original image. Otherwise it will just use the original image.

And when it is set to 'Yes', it will always resize the image, even when we don't specify a specific width or height. When no specific width or height is set in the image data tag, it will resize based on these default settings.

We can choose to Crop images to a fixed width and height. Or set it to proportionally resize based on either the width \.\.\. or the height.

All resized images are saved to a 'resized' folder inside the folder where the original image lives. If you want to use a different folder name, change it here.

The resizing of images is only done on gifs, jpegs and pngs. Any other image formats will not get resized and simply use the original image. The same will happen for the formats we deselect here.

And the last option determines the quality level of the resized jpeg images. Medium should be fine for most setups.
If you want smaller file sizes, set it to Low. But that will cause visible jpeg artifacts in most images. Set it to High if you feel the quality is too low when set to Medium. But this does result in bigger file sizes, which means a slightly slower webpage.

Ignores

By default Articles Anywhere will only show an article if it would normally be visible to the visitor too. This means that the language assignment, the access level and the publishing state of the article all need to pass. If we want to let Articles Anywhere also show articles that are - for instance - unpublished, then we can tell Articles Anywhere to ignore the Publishing State here.

We can also overrule these 3 settings via the plugin tag.

Now these same settings can be separately set for categories and tags. But that only relates to the Pro version. As this comes into play when getting multiple articles via the filters in the multiple {articles} tag.

Security Options

All Security Options are also only available in the Pro version. For most sites you don't need to change these. But it can be useful on larger websites with multiple people that have rights to create and publish content.

Here we can tell Articles Anywhere to not block the use of Articles Anywhere in articles per user group. Disable it in specific components. And block it it in other content, like modules.

Editor Button Options

Articles Anywhere comes with an editor button. These options control how it functions.

Depending on what editor you use, the Articles Anywhere will either show up here or as separate button under the editor.

This window allows us to choose what data tags we want to insert. You might find that you want a different set of data tags selected by default than we see here. Let's say we want to have the Intro Image selected by default and also the text type should be the introtext. We can change that in the settings.

So we just set the 'Intro Image' to 'Yes' and change the 'Text Type' to 'Intro text'.

Now if we reopen the Articles Anywhere popup, you can see these options are now as we want them by default.

The button here shows the word 'Article'. If, for any reason we want to have this show a different word, then we can also change that in the settings.

Let's rename it to 'Insert an Article' instead.

And after a refresh we now have the new button name showing.

Finally, we can also decide whether we want the Editor Button to be available in the frontend editor or not.

Tag Syntax

These settings determine what plugin tag and data tag syntax we should use. In most cases we don't have to change these. But there are cases where you find the syntax conflicts with other extensions you have installed. In that case a solution can be to change the syntax of the Articles Anywhere tags.

But keep in mind: Changing these settings will mean that any existing use of Articles Anywhere using the old syntax will not work anymore. So it is best to change this before starting to use Articles Anywhere in your site.

So by default the syntax for the plugin tag is 'article' inside 'curly braces'. And the Pro version also supports the multiple 'articles' tag in 'curly braces'. And every data tag need to be surrounded by 'square brackets'.

Let's change this a bit. For the main tag we'll simply use the letter 'a'. Multiple articles tag will become 'aa'. And we'll set the surrounding characters to 'double curly braces' for both the plugin and data tags.

Now let's head back to our Custom Blog page.

So we see we were using the default syntax here.

And as you can see, this is no longer working.

So to make this work again we will need to update this code.

{{aa category="Animals" separator="<hr>"}}
{{link}}{{title}}{{/link}}
{{introtext words="20"}}
{{/aa}}

And now it IS working.

Again, you probably don't want to change the default syntax, but if for whatever reason you want a different syntax, you can do so.

Advanced

And finally the last couple of advanced options.

The 'Fix HTML' option should only be touched if you experience any output issues. When placing data tags, like the introtext, inside a paragraph, you can get nested paragraph tags as the intro text probably contains paragraph tags too or other html tags that shouldn't be inside a paragraph. In those cases, Articles Anywhere will try to fix the html so that the html structure remains valid. In the rare cases where this may not be the behaviour you want, you can switch it off here.

The 'Content Triggers' are used to trigger other plugins. If you find that certain plugins are not affecting the content Articles Anywhere generates, you can switch this on. But it is better to first try and solve that by changing the plugin ordering in the Plugin Manager.

Articles Anywhere needs to do database calls to look up the articles and it's data you tell it to. Articles Anywhere will cache the results so it doesn't need to do the database call every time you revisit the page. This caching results in lighter and therefore faster pages. By default it will cache this for the same amount of time you have set the general Joomla Cache Time in the global configuration. Which is 15 minutes by default. You can use a different cache time by setting it here. Or, if you do not want Articles Anywhere to cache these database calls at all, switch this off. This is something you might want to do if you have some complex dynamic setup that requires Articles Anywhere to do fresh database calls every time.

And the last option is this 'Place HTML comments'.

Let's look at the html output of this Blog page. Here, we can see the output generated by Articles Anywhere is surrounded by this start and end comment tag.

<!-- START: Articles Anywhere -->...<!-- END: Articles Anywhere -->

If Articles Anywhere cannot output any content, then there will also be an extra comment here telling you why. For instance, Articles Anywhere might be blocked in this area via the Security Settings, like we discussed before. Or the article doesn't pass the access level.

These comment tags can be very useful when trying to figure out why stuff is happening.

If these comment tags cause issues with the surrounding content where you are using the Articles Anywhere tags, then you can disable the comment tags here.

And those are all the settings for Articles Anywhere.

Recap

So just to recap.

We have seen where to find the Settings that control Articles Anywhere and how those affect the way Articles Anywhere works.

You can find a list of all the settings, including their description in the Articles Anywhere tutorial.

Stay tuned for other videos that look more in depth at specific functionalities.