Get Blogging Fast With a Quick Tour of EverWeb’s Blog Post Page!

If you’ve decided to start your own blog in EverWeb, you’ll soon become familiar with its blogging environment, especially its Posts ‘page’ which lies at the heart of your blogging experience. In this post, we’re going to take a look at the features of the Posts page, hoe to get the best from it whilst saving you time and effort along the way.

Getting Started with Blogging in EverWeb
If you’ve never created a blog in EverWeb, you can do so easily. In some ways it’s obvious how to do this, but it’s also easy to miss… you start by clicking on the Add Page button in the Toolbar, or by using the File-> New Page menu option. You’ll see the list of Theme Templates down the left hand side of the dialog box. Most Theme Template pages, displayed on the right hand side, will have. ‘Blog’ page option. Choose the Theme Template that you want to use, then select the Blog page, then click on the Select button. The blog will be added to your project.

Typically you’ll probably only have one blog per project file, but you’re not limited, so if you want to have two or most blogs in your website, go ahead, there’s no limit!

Fun Facts About EverWeb’s Blog Page
When you’ve added your blog page to your site, it will be displayed in the Web Page List. You’ll also see a couple of interesting things here. The first is that actually the blog is not a page, it’s a directory. Second, the blog will be displayed open. You’ll see that it’s made up of a Blog page, a Posts page and an Archive page.The last interesting thing to note about the blog is that you create all of your posts within the Posts page, so this is like having pages within a folder without it being a directory…

Getting To Work with The Posts Page
The blog directory is open by default in the Web Page List, so you can see that it consists of a blog page with the posts and archive page inside it. The blog and archive pages list the posts that you have written. The former is usually used to show your visitors a list of the most recent posts you have created, whilst the archive page is used to show all of the posts that you have created. As our focus in this post is the Posts page, click on it in the Web Page List.

The Editor Window will now display the Posts page. There are four different sections

1. The Blog Post List Window: This section lists all of the blog posts that you have created. It is also where you add new posts and delete posts that you don’t want by using the Add Post and Delete Post buttons respectively. Notice also the Settings Cog in the bottom left corner of the window. This is where you can import blogs from iWeb or WordPress, set SEO for the post and toggle the Blog Post Editor Window to light or dark mode. When using this window you can reorder the posts by clicking on the label at the top of each column. On the left most column are published indicators, red for unpublished, green for published and grey for draft. Double click in the Date field to change the date and timestamp of the post or to make the date and timestamp the same as the published date/timestamp. if you’re still writing your post, or you don’t want a post published, tick the Draft checkbox.

   When you click on the New Post button, a new post will be generated and you can at this stage give the post a title. Once you have done this, press enter to continue and start writing your post in the Blog Post Editor Window. If you decide to change the post’s title just double click on it in the Blog Posts List, to edit it. Again, press enter to save your changes. Don’t forget as well, to enter your SEO keywords and a short summary about the post using the Post Options… menu option in the Settings Cog.

2. The Blog Post Editor Window
   This is the window where you will be writing you blog post. The Blog Post Editor Window is a basic text editor, but there are formatting options available using the toolbar above it. You can add images, video and audio in to the blog post as well as hyperlinks. You can’t add widgets or containers in to the post though. Formatting your post is fairly basic as the focus is on the writing. When you add text, or other objects in to the post, you will see the formatted results in the Blog Posts Preview Window that’s directly beneath the Editor Window.
3. The Blog Posts Preview Window
   The Blog Posts Preview Window is one that always trips people up. The window displays how the blog post will look when it’s published, which includes any formatting that’s been applied using the Blog Posts Settings Window. The thing that a lot of EverWeb users don’t realise is that this page is like a Master Page, so any objects you add to it, or any formatting you apply inside this window will be applied to all of your blog posts. So, this is where you can add things like widgets and social media buttons. You can even add containers as well to get the look that you want!
4. The Blogg Posts Settings Window: The last section of the posts page is the Blog Post Settings window which runs down the right hand side of the posts page. This pane of settings applies all the formatting settings you will need for the post. Use the Post Cover Image Options will be used to display a thumbnail image on the blog page and the archive page. When using this option, you’ll need to make sure that the Style field is set to display an image as well. the other notable feature of the window is that you can also add a Comments section to the blog post if you want. You can choose either Facebook or Disqus for this. Remember as well, that if you’re going to use a Comments Section, you’ll need to set it up in Facebook or Disqus first before applying it in the blog itself. Full instructions on setting up Comments Sections can be found in the EverWeb User Manual. You can access the manual from EverWeb’s Help Menu, or from the Projects Window.

Setting The Layout of the Posts Page
You can expand or contract each section of the posts page as the page supports the use of Splitters. Simply mouse over the border between the sections that you want to change the height of. The mouse pointer will change to a spitter. When it does this, click and hold whilst drag and dropping the section boundary until it’s where you want it to be. In EverWeb 4.5 (which should be released very soon we think!), these changes will be saved for the next time you return to the blog.

You can also change the vertical column widths in the Blog Posts List window as well if you need to give your blog post title more room, but the change in the splitter will only be for the current session.

EverWeb’s blog post window is the heart of EverWeb’s blogging tool. Do you use it for your blog? What do you think of it? Would you like to see any updates to it in the future? Let us know in the Comments Section below!