Blogs

An blog is a large body of unlimited content. It is very similar to an editorial, but designed to conform to the standards of blog software suites. Blog articles can be distributed using industry standard RSS/Atom feeds, allowing you to push your content to your customers dynamically.

Similarly, if you already maintain a blog using a 3rd party, that content can be consumed by your site and replicated in this tool. THis allows you to synchronize your external and on-site rich text content and provide better SEO. If you wish to synchronize your blog content, contact your marketAgility client manager for more details.

Attributes

These attributes of an blog are as follows:

Property Description
Title A unique identifier for the piece of content. This is used in the site to reference the blog post
Url Identifier The url that identifies the individual post.
Article Date The date of the post
Short Description A brief description of the article
Keywords Used for meta tags and site search, if configured.
External Url Optional link to external supporting content.
Content Unlimited length body of blog content. Can be static text or dynamically rendered HTML.

Searching for Blogs

To find an blog or group of blog posts, a search block has been provided.

The Title field allows you to filter your results to only contain blog posts that share the characters entered in their title. The Active-only option filters your result to only show currently acvtive produdcts.

Searching for a blog post

Browsing Blog Categories

If you wish to work with all of the blog posts in a particular category, you can switch to the browse tab. This will give you an interactive category navigation tool to locate the category you are looking for. Use the arrows to expand subcategories. Once you have found the desired category, click the name to see the blog posts assigned to that category.

To edit the category attributes, click the pen icon. A window will open with the various category elements that can be altered.

To delete the category, click the trash can icon.

Note

Deleting a category will not delete the blog posts in it. It simply removes the category association from any blog posts, removes any associated child elements that reference the category, and finally removes the category itself.

Details

To create a new blog post, click the Add New button above the search criteria. Choose a title and any supporting content.

Adding a blog post

The content field is used to manage is the full length HTML content. It can be simple text, or HTML, including dynamic blocks. For convenience an HTML editor has been provided to allow you to preview your content, and to assist with cleansing any improper or unclosed HTML tags. Click the Source button to toggle between the raw and preview modes.

Once all of your revisions have been made, click "Save All Changes" to commit them to the site. Once the post is created, you will be able to add the full body of the article, assets and any related content.

Categories

The categories tool allows you to group similar blog posts into categories. These can be used for administrative organization purposes, allowing you to quickly navigate to groups of similar posts.

Editing Blog Categories

The categories that this block has been associated with can be seen on the left side of the screen. Clicking the Remove button next to the desired category will remove the current post from that category.

To add this current post to an existing category, select the desired category from the drop down and click "Add To List"

Assets

Assets include any images, videos or supporting documents for a given blog post. Assets are encapsulated into named "views", and can be displayed in your content block.

Editing Blog Assets

To add a new view, select the type of view (Image, Youtube Video, Video, 360 View, or Asset Link), provide a view name an optional url to the asset and click "create new view". For images, you can upload your image assets once the view has been created. For all other image types, you need to provide a url to the location of your asset. Make sure to use a secure url to your content to prevent security warnings from being presented to your customers when the link is presented.

Property Description
Asset Type The Asset type lets your website know what the asset is and how it should be displayed. Some assets need special players, while others can be displayed using simple HTML elements. Once the image type has been selected and the view created, it cannot be changed.
Relation Code This field is a code that keeps the image names unique and relates the image within your HTML. It is recommended that you use something descriptive but following in web image naming rules to ensure that browsers do not have difficulty locating the image. For example, avoid spaces and non url-safe characters.
External Url This is the url to the content that should be displayed in the player for video types or in the hyperlink for asset links. This field will not appear for image views. The url can be to an asset you have created within marketAgility, or to a 3rd party service that houses additional content.

Change History

The change history tab shows all of the changes that were made to this content and by whom. It is useful for diagnosing unexpected results on your site.