Blog posts are personal pieces written in the author’s own voice: a chief executive’s weekly column, a reflection on a project, a guest post from a team. Unlike news stories they are built around the writer, so the post shows an author card and links to everything else that person has written. Go to Blog in the left-hand menu and select Add blog post, or open an existing post from the list. The Blog module must be on under Options, Modules.
Contributors can write posts and choose blog categories but cannot publish. Authors can publish and edit their own posts. Editors and administrators can publish, edit and delete any post. Only administrators can manage blog categories. Your intranet may use custom roles, so where this page says “people who can publish” check Roles and capabilities. The boxes shared with every other content type are described in more depth in Boxes on every edit screen.
Title, content and excerpt
Type the title and write the post in the editor. Anything in square brackets in the title, such as “[Draft]”, is hidden on the intranet but kept in the admin list, which is handy for marking work in progress. The Excerpt box under the editor holds a one or two sentence summary. It appears on blog cards, in the Blog posts widget when Show excerpt is on, and in search results. Leave it empty and the first 30 words of the post are used instead. See Generate an excerpt for the Agento Intelligence shortcut. If a box is missing, open Screen Options at the top right and tick it.
Format
In the right-hand column. Standard is a normal post and is the default.
- Link: the post is a signpost to another web address, such as a blog hosted elsewhere. An External link box appears with an External link URL, and the main editor is hidden because the content is never shown. Anyone who opens the post is sent straight to that address. Cards mark the post as an external link. See Automatically redirect to an external URL.
- Video and Audio: a Media embed box appears for a YouTube, Vimeo or similar address. The player appears at the top of the post in place of the featured image. See Embed video, audio and animated GIFs.
- Status, Image and Gallery are listed but behave as Standard on a blog post. Status only has an effect on news stories.
Blog categories, tags and featured image
- Blog categories: tick one or more. Categories can have sub-categories. They appear as filter pills across the top of the Blog page, with a second row for sub-categories, and as pills in the post’s sidebar. Only administrators can add new categories; everyone else picks from the existing list. See Blog categories.
- Tags: shared with every other kind of content, so a tag links a post to the news, tasks and pages on the same subject. Only administrators can create tags; everyone else sees a tick-box list of existing tags. See Tags and Learn how tags work.
- Featured image: the picture on cards, in widgets and at the top of the post. A post without one shows no picture on cards. A caption set on the image in the media library appears under it on the post. See Set a featured image.
Auto expiry
In the right-hand column. Blog posts date quickly, so you can set them to come down on their own. Switch Auto-expiry on to show the rest of the box, then set the Expiry date and Expiry time in 24-hour form, such as 17:30. Leave the time blank and the post expires at the start of that day. The Expiry action decides what happens:
- Revert to draft: the default. The post comes off the intranet and is kept as a draft, so it can be updated and republished.
- Move to trash: the post goes to the Bin.
Expiry is checked every five minutes and the change is recorded against the post’s author. Afterwards the expiry fields are cleared, so republishing a drafted post does not expire it again unless you set a new date.
An administrator can make expiry compulsory with Force expiry date under Options, Modules, Blog tab. The toggle then starts on with the note “Auto-expiry is required for blog posts”, the post cannot be saved with it off, and a date is required. If a Default expiry period is also set, from one month to five years, a post saved without a date gets one that far from its publication date, with a time of 09:00 and the Revert to draft action. See Module settings and options.
Boxes below the editor
These appear in roughly this order and can be dragged into any order.
Document attachments
Select Add document to attach a file from the media library, with an optional Display title; the file name is used if you leave it blank. Attached files are listed under a Documents heading at the foot of the post, with an icon, the file type and the size.
Related content
Pick pages, tasks, news, blog posts, events, projects, vacancies or training to list under Related in the post’s sidebar. Filter by type or search on the left, and select items to move them to the right. The list also includes any item that has picked this post as related, unless Hide reciprocal related links is on under Options, General. Automatic suggestions are handled separately, in the You might be interested in cards described below.
Sidebar content
Free-format text, images or links for the post’s sidebar, shown under the author card and above the Related list and any widgets. Leave it empty and nothing is shown.
Associated teams
Appears when the Teams module is on. Pick the team or teams the post is about. It is used by the Aggregator page template to build blog listings for a team. Nothing is shown on the post itself.
Keywords
Extra words for search that are not already in the title or content: synonyms, acronyms, old names. Commas are turned into spaces when you save. Put a word in [square brackets] to add it to the A to Z as well. It is fine to leave this blank. See Find out the difference between tags and keywords.
Discussion
Tick or untick Allow comments. New posts start open when Settings, Discussion allows comments on new content. See Allow comments on a news story or blog post.
Author
Change who the post is shown as written by. This matters more on a blog post than anywhere else: the author’s photo, name and job title make up the author card, and the card links to their staff profile and to a list of their other posts. When someone writes on another person’s behalf, set the Author to the person whose name should appear.
Publish, schedule and update
Use the Publish box to save a draft, preview, publish now or set a future date to schedule the post. A preview of a draft or scheduled post shows a badge at the top saying so. Posts appear newest first, so editing the published date moves a post up or down the lists. See Save, preview, schedule and publish pages and posts.
What staff see on a blog post page
The main column shows the title, the published date, then the media player for a Video or Audio post or otherwise the featured image with its caption, then the content. Attached files follow under a Documents heading. A like button comes next when Enable likes is on and Blog is ticked under Likes post types in Options, General, Text and features tab; blog posts are ticked by default.
The right-hand sidebar runs in this order:
- The author card: the author’s photo, name and job title, a Staff profile link and a Blog posts link. The photo is the one uploaded on the author’s staff profile, falling back to their Gravatar or the site’s default avatar. The job title also comes from the staff profile, so ask authors to keep theirs up to date. Blog posts leads to a page listing everything the author has written, headed by the same card.
- The Sidebar content, if any.
- The Related list of hand-picked items and reciprocal links, if any.
- Widgets placed in the Blog Sidebar widget area under Appearance, Widgets.
- Pills for the post’s Blog categories, each leading to the Blog page filtered on that category, then pills for its Tags, each leading to a tag page filtered to blog posts, with links to the same tag on other kinds of content.
Below the main column and sidebar come the comments and the comment form, if comments are open. Last, a You might be interested in section shows up to three other blog posts that share a blog category or tag with this one, newest first, each as a card with its featured image, title and date. Posts already in the Related list are left out, and the section is not shown when nothing matches.
Where a published blog post appears
- The Blog page, chosen as Blog page under Options, Modules, Blog tab, with paging and the blog category pills. See Blog listing template.
- The (Govintra) Blog posts widget, newest first with the author’s avatar beside each title. The widget only shows posts published within its Freshness window, 14 days unless changed, so an older post drops out of the widget while staying on the Blog page.
- The author’s own archive, reached from the Blog posts link on the author card.
- The Comms hub and Aggregator page templates, and the (Govintra) Most recent widget when Blog posts is ticked in it.
- Search results, with a Blog filter button. To keep a post out of search, use the Relevanssi box on the edit screen: see Stop something appearing in search results.
- Tag pages, filtered to blog posts when reached from a post’s sidebar.