Blogs

A Blog is a great way to connect with your existing customers, keeping them informed about the latest product offerings or educating them, as well as to find new customers. It's also a great way to generate rich, engaging and relevant content for your SEO ranking.

Adding new blog posts

To manage blog posts go to Content Management → Blogs → Blog posts.

Click Add New and fill in the information about a new blog post.

Define new blog post details:

• If more than one language is enabled, from the Language dropdown list, select the language of this blog post. Customers will only see blog posts for their selected language.

• Enter the Title of this blog post.

• Enter the Short description of this blog post which will show with the thumbnail on the homepage.

• Enter the Body text of this blog post using the rich editor or style using HTML.

• Select the Allow comments checkbox, to enable customers to add comments to your blog post.

• Select the Include in sitemap checkbox, to include the blog post in the sitemap.

• Enter the Start date and End date for displaying this blog post in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

• Select the Published checkbox, to set the blog post as active as well as set times the post can be available using the Published to and from checkboxes.

• Select the Featured checkbox, to include the blog post on the homepage (*see bottom of article for adding in the module to the homepage).

You can leave these fields empty if you do not want to define blog post start and end dates.

• Enter the SEO info for the blog post as per the standard catfish category and product options.
• Enter Meta keywords to be added to the blog post header.
• Enter the Meta description to be added to the blog post header.
• Override the page title in the Meta title field (the default title is the title of the blog post).
• Define the Search engine-friendly page name. For example, enter "the-best-news" to make your URL http://yourStore.com/the-best-news. Leave this field empty to generate it automatically based on the title of the blog post.

Managing blog comments

To manage blog comments select Content Management → Blogs → Blog comments.

Here you can delete a blog comment. If deleted this comment will be removed from the system.

Blog settings

You can manage blog settings in Configuration → Settings → Blog settings.

You can define the following settings:

• Select the Blog enabled checkbox, to enable the blog feature.
• In the Posts page size field, set the number of posts per page.
• In the Number of tags (cloud) field, enter the number of tags (cloud) that appear in the tag cloud.
• Select the Display blog RSS feed link in the browser address bar checkbox, to show the blog RSS feed link in the browser address bar.
• Select the Allow guests to leave comments checkbox, to enable non-registered users to add comments to the blog.
• Select the Notify about new blog comments checkbox, to notify the store owner about new blog comments. You will need to enable the Blog.BlogComment message template in Content management → Message Templates for notifications of comments.
• Select the Show blog post next/previous links checkbox, to display the previous/next blog as a link based on the settings you created for your blog post.
• Select the Show featured image in next/previous links checkbox, to display the blog image thumbnail as a link.

Click Save.

Making blog posts appear on your storefront.

To show blog comments on the storefront you would need to create a link in your Top Menu/nav by using /blog - this will house all the blog posts that you set as published.

You may be required to add a module to the layout of your page to have *Featured blogs appear on the homepage or the page you wish the blogs to appear. Please see below for adding the module using the layout manager.