Hello and welcome to Smooth Fusion’s Sitefinity
tutorial. In today's video, I'm going to show you how to use the Sitefinity out-of-the-box
blog feature. Now there are six components to the blog's feature, you have the module,
you have the blog posts, you have the blog landing page, blog details page, blog widget
and blog post widget. So first we're going to go into the blog's module, beneath the content
tab is where the blog's module lives. When you open the blog's module, if you have
existing b
logs or if you do not have any blogs they will show here. If you need to
create a blog you can create a blog by clicking create a blog. If you need to modify a blog
you can go into titles and properties, both create a blog and titles and properties
take you to the same view and in this view, you can modify the blog title, blog URL
and additional URLs. Now one differentiating factor between blogs and blog posts are
that posts live within the blogs, so this enables content editors to create multip
le
blogs on their site and then organize those posts according to the blog. So we've already have a post here existing
but you can create a post here, either way, it will take you to the same view and in this
view you can control the blog title, the blog content body which is a rich text editor,
the summary of that blog which shows with the blog post on the blog landing page and
beneath this is the categories and tags and this allows you to organize blog post
by blog titles or categories and tag
those blog post by topics so that you can create front-end
organization and search features for users and then more options, you have the ability
to control the URL for the blog and by blog post and by default the blog post URL is
the blog title, you can add additional URLs here and you can enable and disable contents for
users. So now that we've created our blog, we're going to go ahead and publish it and
now that it's created, you can see that the blog post appears here beneath the blog
and y
ou can go in and drill down into other blogs that you've created in the same fashion.
But now that you have created your blog and you've created your blog post; you need to
create your blog page and your blog post page. The blog page is the blog landing
page where you show all of the different blogs and all of the different blog posts
that a user might be able to drill into those. So, I mentioned that there are two widgets,
there is a blogs widget and the blog post widget, in this demo site we d
o not have
the blog's widget themed but for the sake of example, you can see here that it shows the
three blogs that do exist and if you have a landing page where you have multiple blogs
you might use this with thumbnail images or something along those lines to give users
an overview of all of the blog posts you have on your site. So, to edit the blog's
widget, you click edit, it opens the widget designer and you have the ability to show all blogs,
selected blogs, blogs with more than X posts an
d only blogs with posts no older than X
months and you can go in and organize those, show list setting, show use paging, use
limit, show pagination or do you just want to scan a long list of blog posts or you
have blogs and then you have no limit or pagination and so this allows you to just
have one long unlimited list of blogs that you've created. You can sort the blogs by
the publish date, the modified date and title or manually and next you have your
blog template and since this site does not
have a theme this blog list template does not
actually apply any themes here on this demo site but you may have those set up for your
website. Next we have our single item settings. So, what happens when a user clicks the
blog title? They can be taken to the different page or you can have that blog landing page
load into this blogs page dynamically. Next you have your detailed template, and
this is how the users are shown the blog once they click at the blog on that landing
page that you select
ed here. So, we'll click save and next we have our blog posts widget and
this widget is what shows the individual blog post that you want to show whether
it's from a single blog or from all of the blogs and the widget designer is very similar
to the blog's widget designer that allows you to select which blogs you want to show
post from and the ability to filter within that whether it's all published or only selected
blog posts. Next you have your list settings and whether it's paginated or just
a long
list, you can control how it's organized and then if you have existing templates
you would select those here and next we have our single item settings where you
can select whether the article is shown on the page that you're on or if you direct
the user to another page which in this example we have a blog post page created and a template
that is applied to those blog posts once they are loaded on that page. So, we will
click save and, in this example, they are using the blog posts widget
to show all
of their posts and not differentiating between just blogs. So once we publish our page, we can then
navigate to the blog post page in which the blog posts are displayed on and this is
the page that blog posts are dynamically loaded on so users don't actually hit this
page, the blog post page, but instead it is appended with the blog post URL here
and I will show you that in a moment but this widget is configured similarly to the
other blog page with one exception and that is the appl
ication of a template as well
as the auto-generated page. So, the auto-generated page dynamically loads that post within to this
page. We can click save and we will publish that and when we navigate to the front end
of the blog page, you can see that the blogs are listed here at the top and beneath
it with the blog post widget you can see the list of all of the blog posts that are
published here. So if we click into one of these posts it will take us to the blog
post page which you can see is lo
aded into the blog post page and is a URL is appended
with the blog title and the blog post title and date and so you have your title, you
have your publication meta information, you have your content body and you have
your comments below and that is Sitefinity out-of-the-box blog feature. For more Sitefinity
tips and tricks, follow our channel and don't forget to follow us on Twitter.
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