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It's easy to activate blog functionality
on your storefronts,
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allowing you to create informative
SEO ready articles for your user base.
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Here, we'll show you
how to activate the blog feature
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and to get a sample blog created.
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In addition, we'll see how to add
the blogs module to our storefront pages
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so that we can see featured blogs
from any of our pages.
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So there's a few sections
within the Infigo
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admin which are dedicated
to the blog functionality.
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So if I just start searching blog,
you'll see a few of them there
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and I'm going to start off with my blog
settings.
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By default,
blogs are disabled on your storefront.
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This functionality is activated
by clicking the blog enabled checkbox
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and making sure that you hit safe.
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Please
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note this does not mean that bugs will now
be automatically visible
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on your storefront pages, but
we will cover this in a few minutes time.
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So these additional settings,
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covering all blogs are also present
on this page, such as, for example,
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specifying whether or registered readers
can leave comments.
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You can control whether you get blog
comment notifications
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and you've got various
visual settings in here as well,
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such as the use of blog, featured images
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and the number of posts
which are shown per page.
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So there's some very generic settings
to do with the display of blogs
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on your storefront.
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Next I’m
going to navigate to a separate section
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called blog posts.
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And here we'll take a look
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at creating a new blog post to begin with.
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So details on all of the existing blog
posts are displayed here.
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Administrators
do have the ability to view and edit
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these existing blogs in addition
to creating brand new blog entries.
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So we'll just create a new
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blog entry by clicking
Add New on the top right.
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And now you're just constructing
the content of that blog page.
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Now, this works in a very similar way
to what you have seen
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with product landing page specifications,
category page specifications.
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It's just you basically
constructing your content
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and you've got numerous different ways
in which you can construct your content.
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So for example, as we'll see,
you can use content templates.
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So we'll just fill
in a few of these details to begin with.
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We've got title.
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This is a customer facing title,
so choose wisely
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for this one.
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Below
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that, we've got to choose whether or not
the blog is published once we save it.
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So if you still working on it
and don't want to publish it immediately,
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you can leave that unchecked.
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You'll see in association with that.
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We also have published from
and published to.
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So if it's a time specific blog post,
then you can choose
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between the dates and times
which that post is available.
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We have the featured checkbox,
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so a featured blog will appear in the blog
module, which you can add
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to your storefront pages and again,
we'll cover this in a few minutes
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time.
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Next down,
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we have the input of a short description.
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This is an initial description
for your blog post.
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This will be shown on the main
blog page as a teaser for the blog post.
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Content so people will see this content
along with the title
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before they actually
click on the blog post.
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Now, before we go
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ahead and modify
any of the sort of main body contents,
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we need to go ahead and save this
or just click, save and continue. Edit
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And now we got the
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ability to modify the body editor content.
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So three ways of doing this,
the same as you may have seen on products
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and categories and so on.
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Rich Editor, Code Mirror Editor.
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If you want to write the HTML yourself
or what
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we recommend
is the content template editor.
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This allows you to construct
well formatted content using our building
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block style system where you don't have
to interact with HTML directly.
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If you need more information
on how to use content templates,
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the Infigo Academy contains
a lot of resources on that topic.
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So I'm just going to go ahead and
very quickly create some basic content.
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And then once we've done that,
we can scroll down.
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We then have the ability
to choose a previous and a next blog post.
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So if we want this to be part of a series
and give our users direct access to
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all the related blog posts, for example,
then we can specify specific posts
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which are related.
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So the previous one and the next one.
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You don't have to select those.
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Those are completely optional.
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Next, we have a featured picture,
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so this will be used in several locations,
including a larger sort of hero image
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when you're actually viewing the blog post
and you'll see it as a sort of smaller
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featured image on the homepage
and wherever else you have that module.
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And then finally, on this page,
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we have the ability to apply tags
if they are strictly relevant.
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This allows us to note
similar themes between your blog posts.
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Okay, with that, don't
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want to go ahead and save that page
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just before we move away from here.
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You also notice that we have an SEO tap.
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So search engine optimization
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blog post
can be search engine optimization
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optimized with a range of helpful
fields in the SEO tab.
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And you recognize this as being very,
very similar to the SEO
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capabilities of product pages.
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Okay.
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So let's take a quick look at the blogs
on our actual storefront.
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If I go to public store
just to take a look at my home page
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now, I can put a link up here to blog.
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So whatever I need to do for now,
I don't have any direct link to blogs.
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One way we can do this is to go straight
to the relevant URL, which I'll try first.
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So that's just forward slash blog
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and that will give us
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information on all of our available blogs.
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Again,
we can change the layout of that page
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if it's not quite what we're after,
but it's quite a nice blog page layout.
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Another thing we might want to do
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is to actually have the blog available
for selection on the home page
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itself, or another critical page
within our storefront.
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So by default,
the blog module is not present on
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any of the standard page layouts
and it's got to be added
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if you want to actually utilize it
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on the page.
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You wish to display the blog module,
click on Show Layout Administration,
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which is this little icon
on the bottom left.
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You only be able to see this
if you're actually viewing the storefront
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as an administrator
so users won't see this.
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Specify
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the container in which you want to place
that particular module.
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So the blog module in this case,
and then choose the blog module
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from the module section.
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Click on Add module to container.
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The page will reload
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and then we'll see that
we now have that blog section in
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and that can be added to any page
that we wish.
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Now obviously that we've not gone through
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page layouts in a lot of detail there.
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There are other tutorials available in the
Infigo Academy on managing page layouts.
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Please
note that only blogs marked as featured
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will be displayed in this section
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so users
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can access any of these blogs
just by clicking on the feature tile that
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will take you to that page, This includes
the main hero image at the top.
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That's from the uploaded feature
image that you provided.
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You've got the main blog content,
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you've got the tags
which will take you to associate
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blogs with the same tags
if you click on either of those.
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And then we've got our navigation
to other blog posts as well.
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If we specified them.
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Now the blog posts page
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layout may require further amendment
using the layout administration panel.
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So the one I showed you earlier
on, you may find the default blog page
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is missing some critical elements
such as the header bar footer, The Layout
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Administration panel can assist in adding
the ease of formatting the page.
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The Infigo Academy Content Resources are
managing page layouts using this panel.
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Okay, so you
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also notice that it's possible
to leave comments on a blog post.
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And again, who has the ability to leave?
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Comments will, based on what you specified
in the settings
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as to whether or not it can be anybody
or if it's just people
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that are logged in
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Now, we can actually keep an eye
on the comments
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that we've received on our blog posts
inside Infigo admin.
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if I go back to the admin area,
search for blog yet again
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and you'll see
now we have the option for blog comments
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and that will give you details
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on all of the comments that have been left
on your different blog posts.