Blogs are a great tool to create a community that uses your site regularly, as well as using blog posts to disseminate news on your own site and by automatically posting it to your social media accounts. Create different categories of blogs which you can then pull through onto dedicated pages, such as a News page, via the different blog apps available in Page Manager. You can also feature a blog post and add it as a sidebar app when you want it to stand out from a list of blogs.



Posting Out To Social Media

You can post your blogs to supported social media sites, typically Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. To use this feature, you first need to set up and connect to those accounts via Connect. This creates a secure connection between your site and your chosen social media sites through which you can choose to post your blog posts to appear on those sites. 


You can create an RSS feed of your blog into your facebook page by copying the link from the box below into your facebook RSS URL setting.


Adding A Blog


1. Go to Blog Manager


2. Add A Blog Category


Use this if you are going to create separate categories of blogs, for example, a News category to pull through onto a News page. You can also add subcategories if required.


3. Setup / Edit A Page To Display Your Blog Category, Post Or Featured Post


Go to Page Manager and add a Main Body or Sidebar App to the page you want to display it on. If it's a new page then you will need to add it first.


4. Add A Blog Post


Enter your blog post content and a good image. You can set a status of draft or live, assign the post to an author, select its category and whether you want to feature it in the Featured Blog Items sidebar app. Hint: You can only feature one post at a time, so remember to untick any currently featured blog post first.


5. Tag & Categorise Your Blog Post


Select a category for the blog post and also set tags on the post. These can then be selected in Page Manager to pull in the matching blog osts for display on a page.


6. Post To Social Media


Tick to post out to your social media accounts once you are happy for the post to go live.


Setting Up Your Blog To Use Disqus Comments 

Follow steps 1 - 6 if you wish to allow the Disqus commenting system to be used at the bottom of your blog posts. Disqus provides an easy way for people to post comments and for you to gain more audience, providing a full range of moderator tools. Read more about Disqus



  1. Set up your Disqus account and go to My Home
  2. Click the "cog" Settings symbol in the top right nav bar
  3. Click Add Disqus To Site and enter the required details
  4. Make a note of your "unique Disqus URL" which is your shortname 
  5. Click Finish Registration
  6. Go to Admin in your website > Blog Manager Settings > Disqus Integration
  7. Tick "Use Disqus Commenting System" 
  8. Enter your Disqus shortname in the available field
  9. Click Update
  10. Go to Connect > click to Connect to Disqus

 

The Disqus commenting system will now be available underneath your published posts.


You can build up your story with your own content (held in Content Blocks) and external content (held in Reference Blocks). Try adding several external sources, interspersed with your own comments and editorial:

 

a. Via Add Blog: add a title, upload your image, add content etc as per normal

b. Use the Add Content Block to add another text block to your post

c. Use the Add Reference Block to add an external reference, i.e. a link, to your post e.g. a website url, youtube video url, twitter post url

d. Drag and drop the blocks into the desired position using the left hand bar which shows up when you hover over the block

 

You can then set whether the post is private (only viewable by registered members), whether to allow access for users and guests to comment on the post and whether to auto-approve new comments or hold them as draft until you approve them. You can also tick to be emailed when blog posts are made.


If you have connected to your social media accounts, you can tick to select which of those accounts to post out to. 


Tip 1: You can save the blog first, check it and then come back and tick to post out to social media.


Tip 2: SEO On Page Report - You can run this to see if your saved blog content is correctly search optimised.


Check you are happy with how it has posted out. 

Tip 3: You can delete your posts on social media and re-post if needed.


All done! You have created your very latest post. Keep an eye on comments and moderate them as you wish in Disqus.