IMPORTANT: This article references blogs and blog articles. Depending on your product model, you might see news and news articles in your Community site. These are different names for the same feature and references to blogs in this article are also applicable to news.
There are potentially a number of places where you can access the blog articles written by others and post your own, including your site's Home page and the Home pages of communities you belong to. Because the areas blogs are available depend on your Higher Logic configuration, let's take a look at the areas available with a default Higher Logic site configuration.
Your site's home page
The most recent blog articles from across your site are listed on its Home page.
A community's home page
The most recent blog articles specific to a community are listed on its Home page. From here, you can also click Add to write your own article and publish it in the community.
NOTE: You need to be a member of a community to write a blog, unless it's a public community.
The Browse menu
The default configuration for a site's navigation bar includes the Browse menu, which provides access to all of the blogs written across your site.
On the resulting page, you can click Create a New Blog Post to write a blog article, and use the filter menu at the top right to view the most recent, top rated, and most read blogs, as well as view only blogs written by your Contacts or yourself.
How to post a blog article
NOTE: You must belong to the HLBlogger Security Group to create and edit blogs. See Spam Mitigation - Restrict Blog Creation to learn more.
As explained in the Where to View Blogs section above, there are potentially a number of places where you can post a blog article; with a default Higher Logic site configuration, two primary locations are (1) from a community's Home page and (2) the Browse menu located on your site's navigation bar (refer to the Where to View Blogs section above for more information).
The other main location is from the Participate menu, as shown below:
No matter the avenue you choose, you'll create your article by completing the following fields:
Available options
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| Title of Your Blog Entry | Provide a clear title so users know what your article is about. The title is your first opportunity to grab the attention of other users and entice them to want to read your article. |
| Permalink to your blog post |
The title entered above will automatically be appended here, creating the unique URL to your blog article. Most often, this is what's used, but you're free to modify it however you'd like. NOTE: Only dashes, numbers, and letters are allowed. |
| TinyMCE Editor |
Write your article here and use the toolbar options to format your text and to add images, videos, and links. The file-size limit is 1GB. NOTE: Refer to the Content Editor page to learn more about the available editor options. |
| Meta of Your Blog Entry | The meta description is a ~160-character snippet, a tag in HTML, that summarizes a page's content. Search engines show the meta description in search results typically when the search phrase is contained in the description. Optimizing the meta description is a very important aspect of on-page SEO. |
| Canonical URL of Your Blog Entry | This is the search engine-friendly URL you want search engines to treat as authoritative. In instances where multiple URLs go to the same place, providing a canonical URL helps instruct a search engine as to the primary URL. Click here to learn more about canonical URLs. |
| Associate this post with a community | If you're posting from a community, that community will already be selected here, by default (you can still choose another); otherwise, if you want to associate your article to a specific community, you can select any communities you belong to from the menu. Associating your post to a community gives you the additional option in the Who can read your blog entry? field below to limit who can read it to the selected community's members. |
| Who can read your blog entry? | This is where you set the security level for your post, controlling who can read it:
|
| Who can make comments on this? | Here, you can control whether users can post comments about your article. If allowed, only members of your site are allowed to comment. |
When you're finished, you have three options:
- publish your article immediately,
- schedule it for publishing at a later date, or
- saving it as a draft to continue working another time.
See Schedule & Draft to learn more about these options.