Blog Posts
The Aurora Blog feature allows you to publish one or more blogs on your website and manage the posts in those blogs. There is extensive support for formatting, metadata and theming.
Introduction
A blog consists of various components:
- An Index Page
- Categories
- Individual Blog Posts
The index page displays the blog posts which have assigned this a blog as its parent. Blog Posts are individual pages containing the main content.
Categories are broad areas of interest that are assigned to blog posts and are used for filtering your Blog posts.
Managing Blog Post Categories
In order to manage your blog post categories, please navigate to the the Aurora Back-end, under Content > Blog > Post Categories.
Here you will find a simple list of categories which can be updated much like other content in Aurora.
You can add, edit and delete categories.
Categories consist of three pieces of data:
- A name
- A description
- A parent: This can be set to none, or an existing category can be chosen.
Viewing & Editing Blog Posts
In order to view your existing blog posts, please navigate to the the Aurora Back-end, under Content > All Content and then click the Posts tab.
On this page you can see a paginated list of all your blog posts and the blog index pages.
You can search for posts using the Search Content search bar at the top of the page.
There are various parameters to change the display of the posts list, including the number of posts to display, the order to display the posts in and the format to display.
To edit a blog post, click the blog post title of the post you want to edit. You will be presented with a form containing the content of the blog post. Edit any of the configuration values using the Blog Post Configuration section below as a reference.
Click Save Changes to save your post. If you have any errors, hints will be displayed next to the fields which have invalid values. Fix the changes and save again.
Adding a Blog Post Index Page
You can have multiple blog index pages. For example you could have a general
/blogpage and a more specific/expopage.
To add a new Blog Post Index Page, please navigate to the Aurora Back-end, under Content > Blog > Add Post.
Create a page using the Blog Post Configuration section below as a reference, and be sure to specify Main Parent (no parent) in the Publish > Parent section.
Click Save Changes to save your post. If you have any errors, hints will be displayed next to the fields which have invalid values. Fix the changes and save again.
Your page is now published. Click View Page Live at the top of the post edit page to see the post on the frontend.
Adding Blog Posts
To add a new Blog Post, please navigate to the the Aurora Back-end, under Content > Blog > Add Post.
Create a page using the Blog Post Configuration section below as a reference, and be sure to specify a parent in the Publish > Parent section. This associates a Blog Post to a Blog Post Index Page.
You can preview a blog post before publishing it using the Preview Page button at the bottom.
Click Save Changes to save your post. If you have any errors, hints will be displayed next to the fields which have invalid values. Fix the changes and save again.
Your page is now published. Click View Page Live at the top of the post edit page to see the post on the frontend.
Blog Post Configuration
In this section you will find a table with a description of each of the configuration options available on the Add/Edit Post page.
| Configuration | Description |
|---|---|
| Title | The name of the page. |
| Page Filename | The relative URL of the blog. If this is an index/parent page then it might be something like blog or fashion-blog. |
| Use blog permalink URL? | This option determines how the URL for the page is constructed. If you enter the Page Filename as fashion-blog:When Use blog permalink URL? is enabled the URL will be: www.domain.com/blog/2022/08/fashion-blogWhen Use blog permalink URL? is disabled the URL will be: www.domain.com/fashion-blogUsing a permalink automatically appends /blog and the year and month the post was published to the URL. |
| Content | This is where the page content is written and edited. You can use the WYSIWYG editor or write HTML. In order to disable the WYSIWYG editor to write plain HTML, please untick the Enable WYSIWYG Editor? option in the bottom right hand corner in the Editor panel. To learn more about the WYSIWYG editor, please visit this documentation page. |
| Scheduler | You can automatically schedule your post to be published and unpublished by using the scheduler. This allows you to write your content in anticipation of an event, such as a promotion, and have it automatically published. You can schedule multiple publishes for a post. Click the green add button to add a publish date range, and specify the start and end date. The Unpublish date configuration is optional and can be added at a later time. |
| Custom Fields | Posts can be assigned arbitrary data using custom fields. This allows you to assign meta data to posts that can be used in the blog templates. For example, you might add a Reading Time field or an Image Thumbnail. To add a value for a custom field, select the field from the list and add a value in the Value text box. If the field you want to add a value for does not exist in the drop down, simply select Enter new field name: and a new input will appear, allowing you to specify the custom field name after which you can enter the value. To add another custom field, press the Add Custom Field button. |
| Excerpt | A small excerpt of the post content that can be displayed on the blog index/parent page. |
| Categories | The categories the post belongs to. For example: New Products, Inspiration & News.In this section you can select from existing categories and also add new ones. |
| Tags | Where categories are broad, tags are specific. Tags allow you to identify details in a post and then allow users to filter your posts by those specific details. You can add any number of tags to a post. A fashion blog might have tags like dress, holiday, winter, shoes, etc.Tags differ from Categories in so much that they cannot be nested within one another. |
| Publish > Created Date | The date the post was created, it can also be updated to any other date and time. |
| Publish > Author | The author of the blog post. Only Aurora Administrators that have access to Add or Edit Blogs in Aurora will appear in the select box containing your list of available Authors when editing or creating blog posts. To manage these permissions, please see this guide. |
| Publish > Status | Published or Draft. This setting determines whether the post is published live on the website. A draft is only viewable by Aurora Administrators. |
| Publish > Parent | This is how you associate a blog post with a blog index. Select the index page you wish the blog post to appear on. |
| Publish > Allow Comments | Whether or not to allow visitors to comment on the post. |
| Meta Content > Meta Title | SEO information that is injected in to the <head> HTML tag of the blog post. |
| Meta Content > Meta Description | SEO information that is injected in to the <head> HTML tag of the blog post. |
| Meta Content > Meta Keywords | SEO information that is injected in to the <head> HTML tag of the blog post. |
| Meta Content > Canonical | SEO information that is injected in to the <head> HTML tag of the blog post.This option is important to prevent search engines flagging duplicate content. If, for example there are multiple URL's pointing to the same page, the duplicates must specify the URL where the canonical content lives. |
| Meta Content > Show in Sitemap | Whether or not to include the blog post in the sitemap. |
| Meta Content > Robots | The search engine index settings. |
| Editor > Enable WYSIWYG Editor? | Whether to add/edit content using the WYSIWYG editor or plain HTML. |
| Editor > Enable Smarty? | Whether or not to process smarty content. |
Blog Templates
The blog layout can be customised and styled using the templating system. For more information about the available templates and functions, please refer to the developer documentation.
Blog Frontend
To view Blog Posts, navigate to a Blog Post index page. You will be presented with a list of blog posts. By default blog posts will be ordered by date descending.
You can filter the posts by selecting a category.
From here you can view a post by clicking its title.
To view all the posts by the author, click the authors name.
If your templates display the tags and/or categories on the Blog Post page you can click a specific tag/category and see all the posts belonging to that tag or category.
Updated almost 2 years ago