Blog

Step 1 - Settings >

Blog

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A Blog is like an online diary. The author writes about what he wants in Posts (articles), which he publishes more or less regularly.

 

Here you will find all the tools and options necessary for setting up a blog and managing comments that visitors may make on your posts. The commands for setting up a Blog and writing Posts are organized in the following sections:

Contents
Side Blocks

Your Blog is published at the http//www.mysite.com/blog URL where http//www.mysite.com is that of the website with which the Blog is associated (your website).

Use MagicText to write your blog contents, the Artificial Intelligence-based text generation assistant integrated into WebSite X5 Pro (starting from version 2023.2). MagicText understands natural language, so it is really easy to use: just open it by clicking on the button you find in the fileds where this function is available and provide the necessary information to create the kind of text you want to generate. With MagicText, you can write ideas, titles, SEO titles, paragraphs and tags in different languages and with different tones. You can then use the texts as they are or edit them.

The Blog created with WebSite X5 is a separate section of the Main Site and involves the automatic creation of two Special Pages in the Map: one for the Home Page and one for the Article Page (see Sitemap Creation). If you want to add the "Blog" item to the Navigation Menu, you need to create an Alias of the "Blog: Home Page" Special Page by selecting it and dragging it into the Menu folder.

When you create a Blog, the "Blog: Home Page" and "Blog: Article Page" Special Pages are automatically displayed in the Map. Select them and click on the Properties button (available only for "Blog: Main Page") to open the Page Properties window and define their main properties, or click on the Edit button to define their graphic settings.

Because it is a part of the website, the Blog has the same graphics and the website's template is applied automatically to it.

The Blog's main page lists the latest posts that you have published, in chronological order. Each post has a summary of the main points: title, short description, cover, author, category, date of publishing and a "Read" button. This button opens the specific post in a new page, and the entire article is displayed. Any comments that have been made are also shown, and new comments can be added. The Blog main page reports a limited number of Articles only: if necessary, it then provides the options for the reader to display more Articles. The pagination is then automatically applied and it takes on the style set for the Article Cards.

Apart from the contents of the posts, both the cover page and the pages inside a Blog may have a column on the right side of the page that shows tools such as Recent Posts, Monthly/category archive and Clouds. You can customize this column and decide which tools to make available to visitors, and in which order they appear in the column.

The possibility to receive comments on your Posts from visitors is a great way to develop an on-going discussion between readers and writers. To avoid abusive, irrelevant or otherwise inappropriate comments from being published, WebSite X5 provides you with a dedicated section in the online Control Panel through which undesirable comments can be intercepted. Alternatively, you can use the social plug-ins of Facebook or Disqus to manage comments.

To create a Blog, you just need to report the article list.

Once you have started publishing your Blog, you will need to keep visitors interested by publishing new Posts with a certain regularity. To save time when uploading your project to the Internet, you can choose to publish only the updates to your Blog by selecting the Export only Blog and RSS Feed option in the Destination Folder window.

 With the Pro  edition of WebSite X5  you can restrict access to the blog to registered users who have a login and password. Select the "Blog: Home Page" or "Blog: Article Page" Special Page in the Map and use the command to set it as a locked page (see Step 3 - Map).

See How to create a members' area and define access to it for further information on setting up a Members' Area and defining access to it by creating user groups.

 


Read the guides:

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How to create a blog

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What's MagicText and how can I use it to generate text contents