The Blog Manager > Creating a Blog

What is a Blog? The word "Blog" came from "Web Log", the ability for a web site owner to log just about anything on his / her web site. It's very similar to a forum  but with two fundamental differences, the Blog is ordered with the most recent post at the top, and also in most cases its not required that you register in order to post a reply. So the Blog system becomes a Post-and-Reply environment. Anyone can have their say. This creates a wonderful end-user response system to articles that you (Web Site Administrator) may have written. People have taken this concept and adapted it into full web pages, like Word Press, whereby the Blog environment is the actual site. More and more people are looking at sites as Blogs. For a single user web site this is the perfect platform to express your self on-line. In a more corporate environment this would be a little casual and probably not suited. 

Creating a Blog
To Create a Blog click on the Blog Manager module on the right hand side of the SoftPage Application window.

This opens the Blog Manager, here you will see the Blog topics on the left and the Blogs on the right. Clicking the "All Blog Comments" shows you all the comments that users have added with the most recent comment on the top of the list. If you are using the Blog with Moderation enabled, then you would use this function often, as it would quickly show you all the comments that you need to approve. (More about moderation mode later.)

Below is the Blog Manager window indicating the Blog topics and the Blogs.

You can see that in the example that i have above, there are three Blogs, two are enabled and the middle one is not. You can also see that the third one has 91 comments, while the first one has none. By ticking the box on the left, you can perform some of the administrative functions, like show and hide, and organize the blogs by moving them to different topics.

Click the Add Blog Icon in order to add a Blog to your web page. Remember that the placement of the Blog in the page will be covered later, so for now all we are doing is creating the Blog so that we can add it later.

The Add Blog window allows you to select the Blog topic to add the Blog to. Moving down, enter the Title of the Blog.

If you want this Blog to display, enable the "Display on Web Site" tick box. In this instance you would obviously want to enable this. At a later stage, if the Blog becomes old, this option is useful to keep your site clean without actually deleting content.

Allowing people to comment on your Blog is controlled by the "Allow comments" tick box. This controls the submit box that is situated at the bottom of the Blog comments allowing people to submit their comments.

The actual Blog message, comment or text is simply editable in the main editing window as indicated above. Use this to write your Blog. In this area you can write what ever you like - just remember that when you make changes to this text, its automatically updated and made live on the web.

For now this is all we need to do. Click here to see how to add a Blog to a page.