Create and edit blog posts

If you create or edit a blog post, you will do it via the same dialog window, which you will see below. They are split into sections, but there are only three fields that are required to create a blog post. These required fields are the Title, the URL and the Post. All three of these are found within the main details, everything else could be left as default if you wish.

Contents
Main Details
Meta Information
Thumbnail
Tag Options
Category Options

Main details

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Publish

The first option you are presented with is the publish toggle. By default, this is selected to Now, which will publish as soon as you click create on a new blog post and it'll assign the timestamp there and then. If you you turn the Now option to unselected, you'll be presented with a date and time option, which will default to the current time.

You can schedule a post to appear in the future, and will only appear in lists once that time has been reached. You can have more than one post scheduled for future release.

A sample page is released beforehand on the same URL for regular visitors to your site, with the first paragraph shown so that when sharing your page via social media and other sites, so that they can cache your page beforehand and get the required information, like thumbnail etc, so that it can display links with titles, descriptions and thumbnails, and not a 'Page not found' message.

All blog posts when listed on a page, are sorted by descending date order.

If the post is toggled as inactive, then the post will not show, regardless of whether the publish date has been reached or not.

Active

This active toggle is fairly simple. Toggling this as active will make it live providing the publish date has been reached. Making it inactive will remove it from lists, and the URL will go to a 'Page Not Found' page for normal visitors. If you are logged in as an Administrator, then you will still be able to access the page.

Title

Title of the blog, and will appear at the top of the page and as the main link on blog lists. There is no need to place another title within the post text.

URL

The path to the Blog Post. The CMS will try to populate this field for you once you have filled in a title and the placed the cursor within the URL text box. You can then edit this if you wish should the automatic one not be correct. The CMS will try to automatically generate this every time the URL textbox has focus and is blank.

Some sites may have a prefix before the URL, like /news for example. This can be set to be added automatically within the Sites Configuration options. If your site is already live, then this will have already been done for you by BarkWeb.

Note: If you change a URL on an already published post, the old URL will not automatically redirect to the new URL like when you modify a Page URL.

Post

The post field is the body of the content. Here is where you actually enter the text for your post. This uses the normal Text Editor which is used on most of our text editing plugins. For help when using the text editor, view our dedicated Text Editor help page.

Meta information

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Meta information is the brief description of your page or post which is embedded within the body of your site, but its hidden from normal visitors. The main purpose of metadata is to facilitate in the discovery of relevant information, so basically its there for Google. If you do a Google search for any page, the Title for each results and the small description are determined by the Meta Information on that page.

So be punchy and to the point in your Titles and Descriptions, and imagine what people will need to be search to find your page.

Thumbnail

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Although you can include images within the main body of the post, some of our Blog Plugins strip out all formatting when displaying blog posts, like our Blog List Plugin. The Blog List plugin displays a list of the latest posts, but strips out all of the formatting and images. But part of the Blog List Plugin is the ability to show Thumbnails next to each post. Setting the thumbnail here in the Thumbnail section will determine which image will appear on the Blog List Plugin to reference your blog post.

To set the image, click on the folder icon which will display the File Manager, then, select the image your desire, and the path will be inserted into the box.

Tag options

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Tags are generally thought of in the same way as Categories, but allow you to be more descriptive. You normally have more tags that you would categories, and an article usually has multiple tags selected.

If you've added tags already, then they'll be listed as buttons, select a tag to add it to the blog post, or select it again to remove it. If you want to add a new tag, simply fill in the text box the name of the tag and click the Add Tag button next to it. it'll instantly appear in the list.

Note: You cannot remove tags once you have added them. If the tag is not selected on any blog post, it wont appear anywhere on your site. If you still want it removed, contact us with the name of your site and the tag that you want removed and mwe will remove it from the database.

Category options

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Categories are your way of organising your blog posts. They are more structured than tags, and have more options. 

If you have categories added already, you'll see them listed as checkboxes. Tick the categories that you would like your post to be included in, or uncheck to remove.

Clicking on the Edit Categories brings up the Categories List Table, listing all of your categories. The Categories Management are outside the scope of this article, so please visit the Blog Category Management page for further instructions.