Blog Module
Short for "Web Log", a blog is essentially an online diary where you can share any thoughts that come into your head. Whether your posts are personal or professional, continuously adding new content to your website helps keep your visitors interested and lets the search engines know to regularly re-index your website.
Our Blog module is comprehensively laid out and is very easy to use. Keep reading for more information on the features it has to offer.
Manage Categories
To keep things organised, the blog requires you to categorise your posts. Each category can be as simple as just a title, but there are a few more options available to you, such as:
- A description of the category
- Automatic activation / deactivation dates
- Whether to immediately enable the category for public viewing
We understand that sometimes you might be in a hurry, so from the list of categories it only takes one click to show or hide it from website visitors. It is equally easy to approve changes from less privileged users too.
If you ever wanted to merge the posts in 2 different categories, you can do so easily by clicking the "Move" link and choosing the new destination for the posts.
Manage Blog Posts
Adding blog posts is as easy as adding a category, but you have a few more options available. If you're having trouble deciding which category the post belongs to, trouble yourself no more because you can assign it to as many as you want!
If you want to associate an image with the post you can upload one from your computer or choose one from your website. To keep things as aesthetically pleasing as possible, the image will be automatically resized to 100x100 pixels.
If you have articles that are related in some way, you can link them by adding tags (or keywords). This is a great way to find out the most popular keywords by taking a look at your tag-cloud to see which words are the biggest.
Similar to categories, you can also set automatic activation and deactivation dates, as well as the simple one-click enabling/disabling/approval of posts.
Manage Post Comments
If you choose to allow visitors to share comments on your posts, an administrator will need to approve them in case they are not suitable to be shown on your website. The website administrator will receive an email with an alert of the new comment, and can easily find the comment by clicking on the link in the email.
To help prevent spam attacks, a visitor can only submit one comment a minute per post (by default). This also avoids the visitor having to confirm they are human by entering a code in a picture. You also have the ability to edit comments in case there are unwanted words or spelling mistakes etc.
Configuring the Blog
The settings page lets you set a few options for how the blog should work. Here is a breakdown of what you can set:
- Alternative notification email (for comment and approval notices)
- Whether to allow website visitors to share comments on posts
- The time a visitor must wait between posting comments on an entry
- Whether to show or hide main entry images
- Enable sharing on various social networking/bookmarking websites:
- Twitter, Facebook, Del.icio.us, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Yahoo! Buzz, Google Bookmarks
- There are hundreds more out there, so if you need different links just ask!
User Management Settings
As the website administrator, you can decide what permissions a user has within the blog:
- Allow user to add new blog categories and entries
- Allow user to delete blog categories and entries
- Allow user to publish entries and categories without approval
- Allow user to manage entry comments
- Allow user to change blog settings
