Blogs

A Blog is a great way to connect with your existing customers, keeping them informed about 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 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 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 Start date and End date for displaying this blog post in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

• Select the Published checkbox, to set blog post as active as well as setting times the post can be avaliable 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 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 standard catfish category and product options.
• Enter Meta keywords to be added to the blog post header.
• Enter 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 the 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 your 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 homeage or the page you wish the blogs to appear. Please see below for adding in the module using the layout manager.