Along with the Page Editor, we have completely revamped the Blog/News Editor on Version 3.
As before you get to choose how you would like to use it. You can use it as a traditional blog or more as a news service and you can choose this in the settings.
The first noticeable difference is the layout of the articles. As the image below shows, we have made it much more visual so that you can see all your articles ordered by date along with their status (if not live).
The editor itself for blog/news articles is a more ‘slimmed down’ version of the page editor, in terms of selectable sections available.
The thinking behind this is that blog or news articles are meant for the purpose of purveying news-like information and therefore full page functionality is not necessary, but still more than enough to give you great looking blog articles.
Another addition in Version 3 is the ability to categorise your articles/posts.
Whilst creating this VB Media Blog, it became very apparent how important categorisation is for grouping articles on the front-end.
Categories are not required for the blog to function but certainly are a handy addition.
Another addition to functionality that became very handy through the development of this blog, is the ability to create a template from an article.
This allows you to create a layout, with say an 'Advanced Header' and some 'Basic Headers' and 'Text' blocks with all the settings applied to them.
Once you are happy with it, save it as a template and any new articles that are created will have these basic sections in place with the settings already configured so that you do not need to go through a change all the settings on every article that you create.
Re-saving an article as a template, will only have an affect on new articles and not on any previous articles/posts, for the sake of unwanted/detrimental implications.
I have been using this functionality for the VB Media blog and it has certainly made my life easier - which is why I built it ;)
Every time you add an article/post, it will automatically save it as a 'draft' article. This means that it is not visible on the front end website until you make it 'live'.
Drafts allow you to 'build' your article just as you would any other page. You can then revise and tweak it at your convenience before then hitting the button for the world to see.
If you make an article 'live' but the article date is in the future, the article will not actually appear on your website until we actually reach this date.
This means that you create articles in advance and set the article to go live on a certain date without having to manually change it's status on that day.
Below shows how the articles appear on the main Blog/News page in the Admin Area. As you can see they are clearly distinguishable.
Don't worry, you have not lost all of the previous you may have created.
If you have articles created in Version 2 of the Admin Area they can easily be imported into Version 3 which then gives you all the functionality of the new editor.
We hope you enjoy what we've done with this update and we're looking forward to seeing what you are able to create using this new system.