The article editor menu displays all of the articles available to your account for editing and allows you to do simple searching through the article archive.

Article Search

The top of the article menu shows the current search criteria used to browse articles. By default, these criteria are set to display all available articles. By choosing specific search criteria, you can limit the display to a more precise set of articles, based on section, status, article title or author. Click the "Find" button to refresh the menu based on your new criteria.

• Section. To limit the displayed articles to a single section or subsection of your site, select that section from the section pulldown menu. Selecting a main section of your site will also find all articles from any of its subsections.
• Status. You can choose to display only published articles, unpublished articles or both ("All status") by selecting from the status pulldown menu.
• Title. To limit the displayed articles to those whose titles contain a certain word or phrase, type that word or phrase into the text box and select the "In Title" item from the pulldown menu to the right of the text box. Big Medium will display only the articles that contain that exact phrase. For example, a search for "Man Bites Dog" would return an article titled "Man Bites Dog in Oklahoma," but would not find "Man Bites a Dog in Oklahoma" because the title includes "a" between "Bites" and "Dog." Partial matches also work, so "Man Bites Dog" would also find "Postman Bites Dogooder.""
• Author. To display only articles written by a particular author, type that author's name in the text box and select the "In Author" item from the pulldown menu to the right of the text box. Big Medium will display any articles whose author names include the text you type. For example, searching for "John" would find articles by John Smith, Kate Johnson and Joe Upjohn.

Big Medium remembers your most recent search criteria for the duration of your browsing session and will continue to use those criteria until you change them. To return to the default display that shows all available articles, select "All sections" and "All status," clear the keywords from the search field, and click "Find."

Create a New Article

The Article List

By default, articles matching your search criteria are displayed in order by publication date (the publication date is selected in the display preferences section of each article's edit page), with the most recent articles are shown first. This is also the same order in which Big Medium displays links on the live site when it builds your pages.

You can also sort the article list in alphabetical order by title, author name, or section; or by modification date, with the most recent articles shown first. To change the sort order, click on the heading of the column by which you would like to re-sort the articles. Big Medium indicates the current sort order by highlighting the header of the column being sorted.

Selecting an Article To Edit

Click an article's title to go to the edit page for that article. If your status at the site (indicated at the top of the Big Medium control panel) is writer or editor, some or all of the articles may not have a link on the article title. This is because only publishers, webmasters or administrators can edit articles that have already been published to the site. (Click for more info on account privileges).

Deleting Articles

To delete one or more articles, click the checkbox in the delete column for each of the articles you would like to delete, then click the "Update" button at the bottom of the article list. Be careful! Deleting articles immediately removes every trace of them from your site. This is a permanent change that cannot be undone.

Only publishers, webmasters or administrators can delete articles that have already been published to the site. No delete checkbox for published articles is presented to users with writer or editor accounts. (Click for more info on account privileges).

Copying articles

Clicking the "copy" link for an article creates an unpublished duplicate of the article, including images, pullquotes, content, etc. The new article is assigned the current date as its publication date, and so it typically appears at the top of the article menu. It is titled "Copy of [original article title]"; e.g., if the original article is titled "Why I Use Big Medium," the duplicate article is titled "Copy of Why I Use Big Medium."

Publication Status

The right column of the article list shows the current status of each article: published (on) or unpublished (off). Published articles are available to your site's visitors on the live website. Unpublished articles are available only through the Big Medium content management system, allowing you to edit, prepare and preview articles before sharing them with the public.

• Publishing and unpublishing. Users with publisher, webmaster or administrator accounts can change the status of articles. Select the status you would like for each article ("on" publishes the article to the site, "off" unpublishes it), then click the "Update" button at the bottom of the article list.
• Seeing what it looks like. To get a sneak peek at an unpublished article, click the "preview" link in the red status column. To see articles that have already been published, click "go" in the green status column to go to the article page on the live site.

The Update Button

Use the "Update" button at the bottom of the article list to delete, publish or unpublish articles as described above. If no delete checkboxes or status buttons are selected when you click the "Update" button, Big Medium simply refreshes the article list so that it shows the latest status.

"No Articles to Display"

Big Medium shows the "No Articles to Display" message when it cannot find any articles that match the search criteria displayed at the top of the page. If you receive this message but know that there are articles in the system, check the search criteria at the top of the menu page.

Try a search that is less restrictive than the one you have selected. Because Big Medium remembers your most recent criteria for each browser session, you may be seeing the results of a search that no longer has any matching articles. Try setting the search criteria to "All sections" and "All status" and clearing the text field, then click "Find."

If that doesn't work, make sure that you're browsing articles for the right site. Big Medium allows you to manage multiple websites, and you may be looking at the "wrong" site (hey, we all have our moments). Click the "Switch sites" link at the top of the page to go to another site.

Why Can't I See All of the Articles on the Site?

If you have a writer account for Big Medium, you may only browse and articles you created yourself by clicking the "Create New Article" link. (Click for more info on account privileges).

Changing Number of Articles Displayed Per Page

Administrators may adjust the number of articles shown on each page of the article editor menu. To do this, select Big Medium Setup from the left-column menu of the Big Medium control panel, and change the value for "Number of articles to display per page in article editor."

Need more help?

For further assistance and documentation, visit the website of Global Moxie, the developer behind Big Medium.