Blog

The blog gives your marketplace a place for news and articles: new features, buying and selling tips, local stories, seasonal guides. Posts are listed newest first at /blog, each one has its own page, and the blog has an RSS feed that readers and other sites can follow.

A blog is also one of the easiest ways to bring visitors in from search engines. People search for questions (“how much is a used tractor worth?”) long before they search for a listing, and a good post answers them on your site. See SEO for your marketplace for more ideas.

Switch the blog on

1. In the admin panel, go to Addons.
2. Open Blog and click Enable.

Blog now appears in the sidebar under Content, and your site gets a Blog link. To switch the blog off again, open it in Addons and click Disable. Your posts are kept, but /blog sends visitors to the home page until you switch it back on.

Write a post

1. Go to Blog in the sidebar.
2. Click + New post.
3. Type the post title at the top and write the post in the editor below it.
4. Under Publish, switch on Published to put it live now, or leave it off to save a draft.
5. Click Create post.

A new post can take a short while to appear because of the cache; the confirmation message has a Delete cache button if you are in a hurry.

To edit a post, click it in the Blog list, make your changes and click Save changes. Published posts have a View post button. To remove one, open it and click Delete post (this is permanent; switching it back to a draft hides it instead).

Post settings

Setting	What it does
Title	The post heading and the title in the blog list.
Content	The post. Use headings, lists, links, tables, images and videos from the toolbar.
Published	When off, the post is a draft: hidden from visitors and members, but you and your team can preview it.
Language	Only on multilingual sites: which language the post is written in.
Address	The end of the post’s address, /blog/your-address.html. Made from the title if you leave it empty. Changing it later breaks existing links.
Meta title and Meta description	Appear once the post is saved, under Search engines. What search engines show for the post. Empty means the title and the start of the post.

The first image in a post is used as its picture when someone shares the post on social networks, so put a good image near the top.

What visitors see

Address	What it shows
/blog	All published posts, newest first, with page numbers when there are many.
/blog?search=word	What the Search the blog box shows: posts whose title or text contains the word (at least three letters).
/blog/post-address.html	A single post, with links to the previous and next post.
/rss/blog.xml	The RSS feed of your posts.

The Blog link

While you haven’t set up your own menu, the Nova theme puts Blog in the top menu by itself. Once you build your own menu, add a link to /blog there if you want to keep it. The footer link stays either way.

Blogs on multilingual sites

On a multilingual site, visitors see only the posts written in the language they are browsing in. The Blog list in the admin panel has a language menu (All languages or one language) so you can check what each audience sees. A post opened in another language falls back to the British English version if one exists with the same address.

Comments on posts

Posts have no comment box of their own, but you can add one from Disqus or Facebook. See Comments on listings and posts.

Ideas for your first posts

• How to write a listing that sells, with a checklist.
• How to stay safe when buying and selling (link it from your scam advice).
• A short story about a happy buyer or seller.
• A guide to the most popular category on your site, linking to it.

Related guides

• Pages — for fixed pages like About us and Terms.
• FAQ — answers to common questions.
• Comments on listings and posts — add Disqus or Facebook comments.
• SEO for your marketplace — get found in search engines.