The Blog Module

Blogging Basics

You can find the blog content controls under Content → Blog. This lists all of your posts, their post status, author, and category. It also has an option to publish one or more posts in draft status.

To create a new post, click + Add Post in the top right corner.

This will bring up the blog post form, which has three tabs:

• Content
• Custom Fields
• Options

Basic Blog Fields

The blog comes with some basic fields that are the core fields that the blog relies on to function.

Under the Content tab, the following fields are available:

Under the Options tab, the following fields are available:

Custom Blog Fields

Blogs sometimes need extra functionality beyond just the basic blog post body and title. That's why you can extend the functionality of the blog module but adding custom blog fields.

To add new fields, click on Custom Fields on the module sub navigation. By default, PyroCMS adds an Introduction WYSIWYG field. If you don't need an introduction field, you can simply remove this.

You can use any of your core and add-on field types as blog fields. After adding them, you'll need to display them by overloading the basic blog templates.

Blog Previews

Blog posts need a way to represent themselves on things like post lists/archives, and RSS feeds. When displaying posts, PyroCMS first looks for a custom field with a slug called intro. If it can't find that, it will use the entire blog post body.

You can always override this in your overloaded blog views in your theme, but by default, PyroCMS will use the logic above.

URLs

The blog module has its front-facing view at:

/blog

Each post shows up in the following format:

/blog/{year}/{month number}/{post slug}

Category archives can be viewed at:

/blog/category/{category slug}

Keyword archives can be viewed at:

/blog/tagged/{tag}

Blog RSS Feed

You can find you blog rss feed at:

/blog/rss

The blog module will also add an application/rss+xml link tag to the header of all pages of your site if the blog module is enabled.

Customizing Blog Display

The blog can be customized via view overloading in your theme. There you can adapt the code to suit your display needs.

The views available for overloading are:

The archive, posts, and view views all use PyroCMS tags.

The following tags are available to use by default in the post tags.

{{ pagination }}

A string of auto-generated pagination for the blog posts.

{{ posts }}{{ /posts }} or {{ post }}{{ /post }}

A tag pair containing either a list of posts (like in archive.php and posts.php) or a single post (like in view.php). Available inside this tag pair are the following tags:

{{ title }}

The blog post title.

{{ slug }}

The blog post slug.

{{ url }}

A link to the full blog URL (Only available in the {{ posts }} loop).

{{ keywords }}

Any keywords associate with this post.

{{ keywords }}
    <a href="blog/tagged/{{ keyword }}">{{ keyword }}</a>
{{ /keywords }}

{{ category }}

The category associated with the blog post. Two variables are available for this tag: slug and title.

<a href="blog/category/{{ category:slug }}">{{ category:title }}</a>

{{ body }}

The blog post body.

{{ preview }}

An automatic preview of blog post. PyroCMS first looks for a custom field with a slug called intro. If it can't find that, it will {{ body }}.

{{ created_on }}

A unix timestamp of when this blog post was created. It is usually used in conjection with the date helper.

{{ helper:date timestamp=created_on format="F j, Y" }}

{{ created_by }}

The ID of the author of the post. This is usually used in conjunction with the user plugin to retrieve profile data about the user.

{{ user:display_name user_id=created_by }}

Blog Widgets

The blog module has a lot of handy widgets. A common practice is to create a blog widget area to show on the left/right hand side of the blog indexes.

• Blog Archive Widget
• Blog Categories Widget
• Latest Blog Posts Widget

Blog Plugin

You can also access blog posts with the blog plugin.