News Blogs and Articles
A blog is a collection of news articles which is meant to be updated frequently. You can blog about any topic at all! Blogs are great because the content is always fresh. And since search engines and people are hungry for more information, a blog will help increase traffic to your website.
Adding a Blog to Your Site
There are 2 parts to adding a Blog to your site. First, create the Blog DataSource and add articles to it. Then add a page to your website of type Blog and plug-in your DataSource.
For example, say you create a Blog Datasource called News1. Within News1 you add many news articles. This Datasource News1 must now be added to a particular page to be displayed. The corresponding PageType (also called Blog) can be added in your pages list. Now you can edit the page and choose the datasource you want to plug into the page.
To plug your Blog DataSource into a page, simply add a page and set the page type to Blog. When you edit this page, you will be presented with a list of your Blog DataSources. So simply choose the Blog DataSource that you want to display on the page.
Here is a step by step to adding a Blog DataSource to your site:
- Login to your site
- Click the Pages button in the main toolbar
- In the red bar at the top, click DataSources (if you do not see DataSources listed, simply contact us and we'll enable that feature for your account)
- Next, enter a name for your Blog DataSource so you can identify it later and click Add Datasource
- Now you should see a Blog DataSource listed... click Open to get inside
Adding Articles
Now that you have added the datasource, you can add articles. Click the Add Article button to add a new article.
Enter all the details of your article:
- The article title
- The article body
- An author (optional)
- The publish date (this is how the articles are ordered)
- Check off Make Public to make the article live
Articles, when first added, are listed as
Draft which means they are not be displayed on your website just yet. But if you edit the article and checkoff the
Make Public checkbox, then your article will be live. You can tell which articles are drafts or public looking next to the date just under the title of each article in the article list on the left hand side.
Editing Articles
Editing articles is really easy. First make sure you're logged in. Then click Pages, then at the top click Data Sources then click the Open click for the Data Source you want. Then click on the article you want to edit from the list on the left. Then click the Edit Article link just above the article body on the right.
When you're done, don't forget to click Save Article!
Page Options
If you click the Edit button on a page that is of type Blog, you can edit the following options.
- Blog DataSource: Here you choose the Blog Datasource that you want to plug-in to this page
- Article List Alignment: You can choose to have the list of 5 articles aligned to the right or left
- Article List Background Color: The background color of the box containing the article list
- Show RSS Link: This will display a link to an RSS Feed for your blog - if you don't know what this is, don't worry about it
- Syndication RichText: Here you can plug-in 3rd party services to syndicate your content, such as Feedburner - if you don't know what this is, don't worry about it