Knowledge Base/Official Insight Help/Blogs
Blogging Introduction
Justin Ruffell-Ward - Insight Support
posted this on December 12, 2010 19:34
Blogs provide commentary, or news, on a particular subject, or function as more personal online diaries. Blogs have become common place on web sites during the last decade, even on big corporate sites, as they can add a human and personal style that is attractive to readers as they demand openness from organisations.
Blog posts are displayed in reverse chronological order.
This article describes how to add a blog component to an article.
Creating a Blog within Insight
- First create an area for your blog in your site structure by creating a 'user' group. Title the group as simply 'Blog', or something a bit more personal e.g.Sue's Blog. See for information on how to create a group.
- Create a test entry for your blog. It could be only a one sentance with a title e.g.test blog post1, just something so you can see how a post will be displayed in your blog during the next step.
- Now create another article in the group; add the title of your blog to it e.g.Sue's Blog.
- Place your cursor at the appropriate location in the article then click the add component button, and select the blog component from the list.
- The component will be added to your article and there'll be a new window to allow you to change the blog settings.
- Change the component settings to adjust the margin around the component and toggle the component title and footer bars.
- Change the Blog display options to your requirements. For example you may wish to display more than the default latest 3 blog posts.
- Click OK when you happy with the setup.
- Preview the article to check the display. If your blog displays undesired elements on the page e.g. the title and summary of the latest blog posts are repeated below my blog posts then you'll need to apply a different layout to your group that doesn't contain these elements.
- Select Save to commit your changes.
- Now set this article to be the group homepage article by selecting the
icon. - You should now be ready to begin posting in your blog. When creating articles for your blog keep the Author field filled with your name. This will mean the publish date is displayed which is important for blog entries.
Comments
Is it possible to have an 'archive' listing of previous articles that could be categorised by month/year?
To archive Blog articles I'd create subgroups of your blog for each year and then a group for each month within that year and then post your articles in the relevant period.
You can then set the blog component to display the latest articles from all the subgroups and within the archive folders you could use an 'article list' to list all the posts for that period in a compact format.
I'll do just this - thank you!
Hi
Helpful article. I got a bit lost with the "article list" in archive folder. Any chance you could explain in a bit more detail for a thicky like me.
A blog usually displays only the last so many posts e.g.5, so it's quite normal to want to archive past posts for users to browse through. I suggested this could be done by creating a group in Insight's site manager below your 'Blog' group for each month or year, depending on how often you post, and place the blog posts in there.
You'd use a blog component to display the posts on the blog group (make sure you have 'include subfolders' selected or you won't see any posts). For the subfolders you could use a blog component to display all the posts for that period but that may make a very deep page so I suggested using an article list component in a layout which would list all the articles in that group in a more compact manner e.g.you could set it up to just display the articles title which you then click on if you're interested.
Does that make it clearer? If not could you let me know which part doesn't make sense?
Thanks for the quick reply.
I think I just got lost at "where" you actually put the article list componant. Am I right in thinking that within each subfolder you create a homepage document that just has the article list componant in it?
I'd suggest creating a layout for the arhchive subfolders because then you can apply the same layout to several groups rather than having to add an article list component to a separate article for each.
The 'blog' root group would be best served by adding a 'blog' component to a group homepage article though, as that's a single instance.