Blog - Creating & Editing

Adding a post summary image

To add a summary image to your blog post (as displayed in the blog feeds and summary page):

1. opening up the blog settings and
2. selecting the browse button next to 'Summary image' to choose the image you want displayed.
3. click Apply.

Also see this help video below.

Setting a featured blog post

A featured blog post is a blog post that that pushes to the top of your blog summary page and feeds. Even when you add more recent posts, the featured post will always be first.

1. Only 1 featured post can be set
2. Where you already have a featured post, and which to set another post instead, applying the featured checkbox to the new blog post automatically switches off the existing featured post.
3. The video below shows a tiled layout blog summary page. In the tiled layout the summary image is 4 times the size of a normal blog post.
4. On other blog layouts, the featured post will stay in the same format as other posts, simply fixed to the top.

This help video below shows a featured blog post, and how to set it.

Applying categories and tags to each post

This help video below shows you where to set tags and categories against each blog post.

Create categories and tags

This help video shows you how to add categories and tags to your blog. Categories and tags can be used to help your users find specific types of content faster, and they are also available through your blog feed to match tags and categories to the page they are on.

Changing the date of a blog post

The publish date of the post can be changed by:

1. opening up the blog settings and
2. selecting the 'publish date' and
3. choosing the new date.

Creating a blog feed

This help video takes you through how to create a Blog feed to any page on your site, as well as control the feed layout.

Using Categories and Tags in your Blog Feed

The help videos below shows you how to use your blog feed to match tags and categories to the page they are on.

This is a very useful feature for times when specific types of blog posts match your page content providing your users with a richer user experience and blog posts only geared towards the service page content they are interested in.

For example, you may be a financial company offering:

1. home loans
2. debt consolidation loans
3. personal loans

In your blog you have articles on all of these topics, as well as others such as a category for 'Choosing the right property'.

On the home loans services page, insert a blog feed, and in your blog feed categories, you could select the categories:

1. Home loans
2. Choosing the right property

The feed will now only display blog articles relating to these 2 categories, and no others.

Blog archive feature

This help video shows you how to create the blog archive feature. The Archive feature automatically shows all the years containing blog posts on your site, based on the date set against each blog post.

Blog author

The author that shows against a blog post is taken from the profile page under your account. Changing the name under your profile automatically updates all blog posts. At this time only one author can be attributed to blog posts.

Default blog summary image

A default thumbnail image can be set for your blog posts. This is useful for when you do not upload an image thumb for the summary page view of each post. The default image will load automatically instead.

You can do this by going to:

Administration > Settings > Miscellaneous > Scroll down to 'Blog' and upload your image.

And press 'save all' after you have.

Setting up blog comments

There are a few steps involved in getting your blog comments setup and active. While unfortunately it does require a little bit of work to get this going, your security is most important, and the way this has been setup is for security and to stop spammers. Unfortunately spammers love to target blog comments and without this protection, it can literally mean you have a thousand spam comments in a few hours.

The good news is you only need to set these up once.

Step 1

The first thing you need to do is setup Google reCaptcha under your settings. Google reCaptcha protects both website forms on your site as well as blog comments spam particularly from bots posting automatic comments..

Instructions for setting up Google reCaptcha can be found here.

Step 2

1. Go to Blog settings: Top menu > More > Administration > Settings > Blog
2. Scroll down to ‘Comments’ settings
3. Click ‘Activate comments’
4. Select Approval type (please note you can switch these at any time):
   1. Automatic: this is where a comment will automatically appear on the blog
   2. Admin required: this is where you will need to review a comment before it appears live

Step 3

Step 3 is setting up social login buttons. Click here to find out how.