Blog - Creating & Editing

On this page:

  1. The blog summary page
  2. Blog summary/feed layouts
  3. Creating a blog post
  4. Adding a post summary image
  5. Setting a featured blog post
  6. Categories & tags in each post
  7. Create categories & tags
  8. Changing the date of a blog post
  9. Creating a blog feed
  10. Using categories & tags in your blog feed
  11. Blog archive feature
  12. Blog author
  13. Default blog summary image
  14. Setting up blog comments
  15. Open Graph settings

Limecube provide a blog with all the features available as with any other page within the page editor. This allows you to complete customise your blog layouts with any kind of element Limecube has available. Best of all, it is all done within the same area as page creation to make everything seamless and easy to use.

The blog summary page

The blog summary page is your main blog page (except where your whole site is a blog) and the page that displays blog post previews for the blog posts within your site.

Understanding your blog summary page

By default, each site has a blog already setup by default and ready to go. Each time you add a new blog post, the post will automatically appear under the blog page, as a sub-page. As long as the blog post has been published, it will automatically display on the summary/feed that has been inserted into the summary page or anywhere else on your site.

Layouts

Layouts change how your blog summary or feed show on your page. Click each to see a live preview of the change.

Some layouts will not display all the options below.
Categories filter This setting controls the blog feed only containing posts from this category(s). Not usually used for your main blog page.
Tags filter This setting controls the blog feed only containing posts from this tag(s). Not usually used for your main blog page.
Number of Posts This controls how many posts will be displayed in this area. If this is on your main blog page, it is recommended to enable page numbers below, so your site visitors can navigate to blog posts past this number.
Excerpt length The number of characters that will show in this feed.
Link text This controls the anchor text for clicking through to read the full post.'
Description This setting controls whether the description will show or not show in the feed.
Author This pulls the Author full name from your profile page.
Date Controls whether the date of the post will show in the feed.
Categories Controls if the Category of the post will show in the feed.
Tags Controls if the Tags for the post will show in the feed.
Page numbers This turns on/off the option to have page numbers and previous/next under your blog posts for navigation.
Posts per row This setting controls how many posts will show per row. When activated, it will resize the post preview to fit the number of posts required into the width of the section.
Width You can control the width of posts by auto, which automatically changes the width of each post to fit the section, or fixed, which controls the exact width of the post. Often auto will provider a nicer design and fit better into the whole page.
Image Thumb Horizontal layout only: Controls whether the image thumb will display in this area.
Post image width Horizontal layout only: This sets the width for your image, and automatically adjusts the width of the description where applicable.
Post image height This sets the height for your image.
Minimum width Masonry layout only: This controls the minimum width of the blog post cards, as the cards' width is flexible.
Rounded corners Masonry layout only: This gives the blog post image rounded corners.
Blog spacing
 Blog spacing controls the space between posts.
Space around text Controls padding to allow enough area for your text to breathe based on the settings above.
It's important to note that a Blog summary page can only be used once on the site. This is due to the logic that attaches your blog posts to the blog summary and associated blog feeds. If you want a blog feed on various pages, you can add the 'Blog summary/feed' element onto any normal page.

Blog summary/feed layouts

To add a blog feed to a page:

  1. Click add element on the top admin bar
  2. Scroll down to the 'Blog summary/feed' element
  3. Drag it onto your page where you want it to display

Help Video

This help video shows you the basics of changing the blog summary layout.

Layout examples

Below are some examples of different layouts (not your only options) that can be achieved by playing around with the blog summary/feed settings.

Creating a blog post

Before you try to add a blog post, make sure the blog summary page has been setup as mentioned above.

This help video takes you through how to add a blog post. A blog post behaves almost the same as an other page in Limecube, and can contain any type of element you can use on any page in Limecube.

To add a new blog post:

  1. Open the pages panel and click 'Add new' at the bottom
  2. Click 'New blog post'
  3. Add your page name - this is usually your blog post title.
  4. Select the layout you want
  5. Click apply, and start entering content as you would on any newly added page

The exception being that blog posts can only reside under a Blog Summary page, and automatically insert date and author to the post.

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. select the browse button next to 'Summary image' to choose the image you want displayed.
  3. click 'Apply'.

Adding a post summary image

You can also update an image from the main blog summary page.

  1. Hover over your current image and look for the icon in the screenshot below.
  2. Click that icon, to open the settings shown in the step above.

blog summary editing icon

Also, please take a look at this help video below.

Setting a featured blog post

A featured blog post is a blog post 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.

featured blog post setting

  1. Only 1 featured post can be set.
  2. When you have a featured post already set, ticking this on a new post, automatically de-selects the other featured checkbox.
  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, fixed to the top.

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.

Help video

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

Your content goes here.

Click anywhere in this content area block or click the pencil icon in the top right to change this text.

Use this space to write or add any type of content (text, video or images) you wish, there is plenty of space to fill up. Tell your readers all about you and what you you are offering, it’s all up to you.

And importantly, don’t forget a call-to-action if you want the users to take extra steps.

Need to move this content?

Drag and drop onto any other area of the page where you see the editable area.

Links in content are disabled in admin view, so copy: https://support.limecube.co/content-blocks and paste to your browser to find out more about working with content blocks.

Categories & tags in each post

Categories and tags help combine news and blog posts into areas of interest for your audience. Categories and tags are displayed at the bottom of a blog post by default, and if your blog summary layout supports it, you'll often have these in a side column.

Categories and tags are set under your blog settings:

categories and tags

To add new categories and tags, click the relevant buttons:

adding categories and tags

Click the button to create a new category.

You can also edit or delete from this view:

categories adding and editing

Fill out your necessary fields:

category fields

Category title The label for your category
Category URL The page url to access your category on the front of your site
Meta Title Used for SEO purposes
Meta Description Used for SEO purposes
No index It is recommended in most cases you keep this no indexed to avoid duplicate content issues. Google can still find each blog post through the main summary page.
No follow This tells Google whether they can or cannot follow the links on this page.
Show on menu

If this is selected, it will publish this category to your blog menu as a sub-page.

The end result will look like this:

Front end blog sun-menu

Help video

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

 Help Video - Create categories and tags

This help video shows you how to add categories and tags to your blog.

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.

Changing the date of a blog post

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.

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
Important notes: Under both approval conditions you’ll receive an email notification to your subscriber email address to let you know a comment has been submitted and on what page. Depending on the nature of your posts as to whether you want to have automatic or admin approval selected. If you are not sure what types of comments you may get, we recommend choosing ‘Admin required’ just to be sure no unwanted comments appear on your blog for everyone to see.
At this time Limecube does not allow guest comments to be left. This is completely for your protection to stop spammers and trolls from leaving spam or hateful comments.

Step 3

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

Open Graph settings

Open Graph settings are important for blog posts being shared on social media.

To find out how to apply Open Graph settings to your blog post click here.

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