How to Allow Frontend Article Submissions in Joomla

: Written by Steve Burge Steve Burge; Published: 31 August 2020 31 August 2020

One Joomlashack user came to us and asked this question:

"I want to allow some users to create Joomla articles from the frontend of our site. But, I don't want them to see articles written by other users".

In this tutorial, I'll show you how to do this with the Shack Article Manager extension.

If you haven't used Shack Article Manager before, these two videos will be a good introduction. You can then follow along with the rest of the tutorial and set up your publishing workflow.

Introductory videos for Shack Article Managger

How to allow users to create content from the Joomla frontend:

How to manage articles from the Joomla frontend:

Step #1. Create a user group for contributors

The first step is to create a new user group.

In your Joomla admin area, go to Users > Groups > Add New Group:

add new user group

In the top left corner, click the green "New" button:

click new

Creae a new user group called "My Contributors".
Select "Registered" for the "Group Parent" option.
Click "Save & Close".

parent user group registered

Step #2. Create an access level for contributors

In thtis second step, we'll create an access level for this new contributor group.

Go to Users > Access Levels > Add New Access Level:

Create an access level called "My Contributors".
Select the User Group you created in the previous step, as well as the "Registered" group:

my contrubutors access level

Step #3. Add contributors to the new user group

You now have a user group and an access level for your Joomla article frontend contributors.

This is good time to add the contributor user accounts. In the image below, I have created two users: "Contributor 1" and "Contributor 2":

my two contributors

Let's assign each of them to their user group of the frontend contributors.

Go to Users > Manage.
Click on the name of the user to be a frontend article contributor:

click on the name of the user

Click the "Assigned User Groups" tab.
Select the "Registered" group, and the user group you created for your Joomla contributors.
Repeat the same steps for all the users you want to have as contributors.

assign registered and contributors user groups

Step #4. Set permissions for the contributors

In this step, choose the permissions for our contributors.

Go to Content > Articles.
In the top right corner of the "Articles" screen, click "Options":

click options

Click the "Permissions" tab:

click the permissions tab

Make sure you have "Articles" highlighted in the "COMPONENT" column:

make sure you have the articles highlighted under components

Select the User Group you created in Step #1. For this tutorial, I chose "My Contributors":

click my contributors

Select "Allowed" for the "Create" and "Edit Own" actions.
Click "Save & Close".

set permissions for the actions

Step #5. Allow access to the frontend

We are nearly finished at this point. We just need to give the contributors frontend access to Shack Article Manager.

Create a menu item using the "Shack Article Manager" type:

Set the "Access" parameter to the "Access Level" you created for contributors.
Click "Save & Close".

set the access to your contributors

Check the final result

Log into the frontend page of your Joomla site using one of your contributor accounts.
Visit the "Shack Article Manager" link.
Try creating Joomla articles. You should find that each of your contributors can see only their own articles:

final result