The Blog template displays blog article content, includes additional navigation and publishing details, and allows users to add comments.
Page Title and Body Content
An article using the Blog template displays its title and introductory text at the top of the page. Page body content, including inline elements, appear as described for the Default template.
Related Image
The first image related to the article will usually appear in the top left of the page.
Publishing Information
The Blog template displays information about the author, when the blog was published, and when it was last modified.
The blog's author, taken from a mandatory field in the article extras, and the article's "Display start" date, appear between the introductory text and main blog content.
The last modified date is displayed beneath the blog content.
Categories
Metadata values related to the blog article appear as links next to the publishing information. These links take the user to an article using the Search template. This performs a search with the selected category as a search facet. That means the search will display all of the blog articles that also have the selected value.
Only related metadata values that match facets in the search are output. See below for information about building the article structure and setting up the search.
Navigation
Navigation links are automatically output beneath the blog content. They allow a user to navigate backwards and forwards through blog articles that are located at the same level as the current blog. The links use the blog article headings or alternate link text if present.
Comments
Comments can be enabled or disabled in the article extras of your blog. All users must be logged in before they can comment, although all comments, once approved, are visible to everyone. If a blog already has comments, you can hide them all by unchecking the option in the article extras. It is not possible to "close" a comment section and display existing comments.
All comments are stored in a single iCM Forum, related to the blog article. Each article automatically creates a new thread in the forum as soon as the first comment is added, ie there is one thread per article and the name of the thread is the article ID. Each comment is a "message" in the thread.
We recommend that your Blog forum is moderated. This means the thread will have to be approved before any comments appear, and that comments posted in the blog thread will need to be approved before they appear.
You may find that multiple threads are created per article. This can happen if multiple comments are added before the original thread is approved. You can tidy up multiple threads by moving comments from any duplicates to the main thread.
There's more information about forums, threads and messages in the iCM Forums documentation.
Each comment includes the user's name and the date it was posted (most recent at the top). The Blog template will attempt to load the user's DISPLAYNAME if one has been set in their profile, otherwise it will load their username.
Article extras let you control the number of comments that will appear beneath the blog. Additional comments above this value will cause the comment list to be paged.
Recommended Article Structure
Blogs are designed to be grouped together beneath a search article. You don't have to do this, but it's a nice way to use blog categories.
This screenshot shows a suggested article structure in iCM.
We've decided not to display the year and month articles and instead have the blog area entirely powered by search. Alternatively you could set the year and month articles up using the List template. The important thing is that there is a search article at the top of the blog structure.
Search
The Blog search article uses the Search template. In its article extras the root article is set as itself (ie it will only search for its own child articles). A search facet should be created to filter results using a suitable "blog category" metadata property.
As described in the "Categories" section above, only metadata values that are also search facets will be output as links on blog articles.
For search results to appear using the custom view described below, the search article extras need to be set to display the custom "Article view".
Navigation
In the article structure screenshot above, "Next" and "Previous" links (where appropriate) will allow users to navigate between the three blog articles in June.
Custom View
The Blog template implements a custom view when it appears in Lists and Search results (if your Search template is set to show custom article views in its article extras).
This view includes the blog title, publishing information, optional image, introductory text, and a count of the comments which also acts as a direct link to the top of the comments section.
Article Extras
| Field Name | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| AUTHOR | Text input | A mandatory field for the author's name |
| ALLOWCOMMENTS | Checkbox | Check this box to enable comments. Existing comments will be hidden if this box is unchecked |
| PAGESIZE | Drop-down | The number of comments per page beneath the blog |
Related Content
Each blog article must have a forum related to it if comments are enabled. Any number of metadata values can be related to the article. If the metadata values are from a property that is configured as a facet in an ancestor search article, they will be output as links.
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