title: Programmatically adding an article to Joomla
body: <p>I am very new to Joomla (frankly just started exploring the possibility of using Joomla) and need help with programmatically adding articles to Joomla backend tables (please see details below). Also along the same lines, I would like to understand how should values for the  columns:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>parent_id</li>
  <li>lft</li>
  <li>rgt</li>
  <li>level</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>be generated for the table <code>jos_assets</code> (<code>#__assets</code>) and what is their functional role (eg are they “pointers/indexes” analogous to, say, an os inode to uniquely indentify a file or are they more functional attributes such as identifying the category, subcategory etc)</p>
  
  <p>It might help to use the following SIMPLIFIED example to illustrate what I am trying to do. Say we have a program that collects various key information such as names of the authors of web articles, the subject type of the articles, the date of articles as well as a link to the article. I want to be able to extend this program to programmatically store this information in Joomla. Currently this information is stored in a custom table and the user, through a custom php web page, can use search criteria say by author name, over a certain range of dates to find the article(s) of interest. The result of this search is then displayed along with a hyperlink to the actual article. The articles are stored locally on the web server and are not external links. The portion of the hyperlink stored in the custom table includes the relative path of the physical document (relative to the web root), so for example:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Author   date         type    html_file
  Tom      08-14-2011   WEB     /tech/11200/ar_324.html
  Jim      05-20-2010   IND     /tech/42350/ar_985.html
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>etc.</p>
  
  <p>With all the advantages that Joomla offers over writing custom php search and presentation pages as well as trending etc, we would really like to switch to it. It seems that among other tables for example that <code>#__assets</code> and <code>#__content</code> can be populated programmatically to populate Joomla from our existing php program (which is used to compile the data) and then use Joomla.</p>
  
  <p>Any examples, suggestions and help is greatly appreciated</p>
  
  <p>Kindest regards
  Gar</p>