Creating and setting up your blog

Create new blog

To create a new blog using the MVC components, create a new item from the /sitecore/templates/Branches/Modules/WeBlog/Blog MVC branch template. The branch template will create a new blog for you, and also all standard folders and items.

:warning: You can use the /sitecore/templates/Branches/Modules/WeBlog/Blog WebForms branch template to create a blog using WebForms components. WeBlog versions 4.1 and prior support WebForms.

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When you created a new blog, you need to fill in some settings.

If using the Experience Editor, click on the Blog button in the Settings chunk of the WeBlog tab on the ribbon.

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Here you can enter the name of the blog you want to create and your email as well as some settings for your blog.

Blog Settings.png

These settings are fields on the blog item. You can also edit them directly using the Content Editor.

Now that you have created your first blog it is time to populate it with some entries. So click the New Entry button on the WeBlog tab of the Experience Editor and enter the name of your entry.

WeBlog fully supports the Experience Editor, so fields of the entry can be edited inline.

If you need to go back and change the title for your blog or some of the other settings that you set when first creating the blog, you can simply click the Blog button in the Settings chunk on the WeBlog tab of the ribbon to edit the settings.

The settings of the entry can be edited by clicking the Entry button in the Settings chunk of the WeBlog tab on the ribbon.

Entry Settings.png

What you get in the content tree when you create a new blog (RSS, categories)

When you have created your blog besides being able to edit it in the Experience Editor some items are also created in the Content Tree.

Content Tree.png

Here you can edit the same information as in the Experience Editor as well as the configuration for the RSS feed for your blog. You can read more about the RSS settings in the 'Setting up the RSS feeds for your blog' section below.

What components do you have available to add to your blog.

There are a number of different components which can be included in the sidebar of the blog. These components allow the user to navigate to or list different entries.

Entry sidebar.png

Refer to the Sidebar Components page for details on each component.

Setting up the RSS feeds for your blog

The Blog entries child item under the blog item is the RSS feed for the blog. The feed is a standard Sitecore RSS feed item and can be customized as any other RSS feed item is. The fields of the item allow setting the Sitecore query used to populate the feed, the title and description of the feed, and cache settings. The Items fields has been pre-populated with a Sitecore query to read the entries from the current blog. If you're using a customized entry template, update the query to select entries based on the custom template.