Blogging
Class overview
In this class you’ll learn how to create blog posts, how to manage them, and what your blog roll page is. We also show you a few additional options for displaying your posts on your blog roll, and how you can create more advanced blog posts with elements such as button, call to action, etc.
You’ll also find out how you can manage comments on blog posts.
And finally, if you don’t want to use a blog at all, you can also switch it off altogether.
- Creating & managing blog posts
- Your blog roll page, and more options for it
- Using a page builder to create your blog posts
- Managing comments
- If you don’t want to use a blog (for now)
1. Creating & managing Blog Posts
In the video below we take a look at the posts screen where you can manage your blog posts, and we’ll see how to create blog posts.
2. Your Blog Roll Page, and more options for it
Your blogroll page (often also called blog, articles or news; dependent on the title you give that page), is where your Blog posts display in chronological order, with your latest post at the top.
By default your blogroll page is filled with your posts by standard WordPress functionality.
But it’s also possible to use Divi Blogroll Modules to show your posts. There are two options:
Using Divi Blog Roll Standard Module
Going for this option is similar to standard WordPress functionality, gives you more possibilities to exactly tweak the amount of preview text that shows for each post, and lets you control which posts show up…
Using Divi Blog Roll Grid mode
In grid mode your posts show in a magazine style layout, with a small image and text preview. Again you can control how much preview text shows, and which posts come up…
3. Using a Page Builder to create your blog posts
The standard way to create your blog posts is by using the WordPress editor, and this is the way we have set you up with the example blog posts. This is the easiest and most straightforward way, but working this way it’s not possible to insert things like buttons, or a call to action, like you can with Divi modules. There are two options that allow you more possibilities when creating your blog posts:
1. Creating your blog posts with Divi
You can switch to creating blog posts with Divi, which makes it possible to use the Divi Builder to create varied layouts, and also use all the Divi Modules. We’ve prepared a few starter layouts for you that you can load into your blog posts so you can use Divi modules also when blogging. Blogging using the Divi Builder also gives you the possibility to create custom sidebars with modules next to blog content.
2. Creating your blog posts with the WordPress 5 / Gutenberg editor
In December 2018, there was a big WordPress update, and with it WordPress moved to page builder technology for its text editor. Compared to Divi, the technology is still fairly basic now, but certainly very usable. And so you could choose to use the new Gutenberg block editor for your posts. If you did, you’d have more options available than with the standard WordPress editor (think of buttons and columns), but less than with the Divi Builder (which would allow you to use all the Divi modules that you’re already used to; so also calls to action, email optins, etc.).
A consideration before using the Gutenberg editor is that you need to completely switch off the Divi back-end builder. That’s because Gutenberg is technically also a backend builder, and with page builder technology you can only use one or the other, otherwise they’d start conflicting.
You’d continue to use the Divi Front end builder as normal. And because all the controls are the same in Divi’s frontend and backend builder anyway, we think it wouldn’t be a big deal to go without the Divi backend builder. It would really just be something new to get used to… next to learning to work with the new WordPress Block Editor of course…
The new WordPress block editor is intuitive to use, and here to stay, so if you’d like to have a few more options for your blog posts than in the standard WordPress editor, but don’t need everything the Divi Builder offers, Gutenberg is a very good option.
On the other hand, you don’t have to use everything from the Divi Builder and you could simply choose to only use those parts of it that you need and ignore the rest. That way you’d build on and further develop your experience with the Divi builder, which is already our strong favourite for building pages…
A final (but we think minor) consideration of using Gutenberg for your blog posts is this: if you’d ever want to move your blog posts to another WordPress site, it’s easiest if your posts are made with a native WordPress editor (be it the classic one or the new Gutenberg block editor). If you create your blog posts with Divi, you can also move them to a different site, but the new site would also need to have Divi installed to be able to display your posts created with the Divi Builder. If your posts are created just with WordPress, they can be imported into any other WordPress site. We feel this is an edge case, but perhaps something to keep in the back of your mind.
4. Managing Comments
How to manage your blog post comments, or switch them off:
5. Disable you Blog
If you don’t want to use your blog at all, you can simply not use the post functionality on your site. On top of that, you’d also want to remove the blog from your menu and tell WordPress that you don’t use a blog. Here’s how you do that.
Remove the blog item from your menu
Also see the class about menus for more info on working with your menus.
- From your dashboard go into ‘appearance > menus’
- Select your main menu
- Delete the blog item
- Save your menu
Tell WordPress you don’t blog
For this you go into ‘Settings > Reading’ and make sure you use a static page for your homepage, and nothing for your posts page. So like this:
Save your changes, and now WordPress won’t show a blog on your site.