What is a Blog?
A Blog is one of several options available as a secondary level to your Site. The primary characteristics of a Blog are:
- Allows Blog Posts to be created and grouped underneath (at the tertiary level); those posts will NOT appear in the local navigation menu;
- Rather, they will appear in the main body of the Blog landing page with corresponding title, thumbnail, and “teaser” text.
Why Use a Blog?
A Blog is great when you want space on your site dedicated to a related topic or theme that will have ongoing and frequent updates. This could be something like office/department news, explorations of student/faculty research, student profiles, etc.
(Please note: While the tool itself is referred to as a Blog, you do not need to title your content with the word “Blog” at all if you don’t want. You can use this as a news feed and label it as such, if you’d like.)
For example, the “Work in Progress Blog” on the Progress Brand Updates site: https://www.ithaca.edu/progress-brand-updates/work-progress-blog, or the “Writing Alumni News” blog on the Department of Writing site: https://www.ithaca.edu/academics/school-humanities-and-sciences/writing/writing-alumni-news.
A Blog will serve as a secondary landing page. As posts are published, the “teaser” content (Blog Post title, thumbnail, and teaser text) will populate the Blog landing page and direct users to the individual post.
How to Create a Blog
Go to the landing page of the Site to which you want to add the Blog and click “Add Blog” from the edit options above the page content (below the blue header with the site title).
This will bring you to the Blog creation page. Fill in the Title field to name your Blog. (Remember, this will serve as the title of the blog, appear in the local navigation menu, and form the URL.)
Fill in the “Intro Heading” and optional “Intro Text” fields to give readers some context about your blog. (Note, the entire “Intro” block can be removed, but this is not advised.)
There are no additional paragraph types available for the landing page of the Blog, so you will NOT see an “Add ___ to Content” dropdown menu as you would on other content types in Drupal.
Keep the state as “Draft” to save your work without publishing the Blog, or change to “Published” to make the site live.
Click the “Save” button.
Note: You will need to create Blog Posts to populate your Blog once it is created. Review the Add a Blog Post article if necessary.