Spark Pay online stores now has a Blogging feature.
The Blog feature consists of several new pages and widgets in your theme. We created the layouts and mergecodes for the blog pages with high flexibility in mind.
New pages include:
These pages are located in the Specialty Pages area of your theme.
- Blog Roll
- The Blog Roll page is the main page of a blog. It will list the most recent posts for that particular Blog. The Blog Roll page can show comments, and even allow comments to be posted without having to leave the page.
- By default the Blog Post layouts on this page will show the Blog Post's Title, Teaser title, Teaser image, Teaser Description, an excerpt of the Post content, 2 comments, and the add comments box.
- Blog Post
- This shows an individual post. This page will show all the blog post's content, all comments (paged) and the add comments box.
- Blog List
- This page lists all blogs that have been added to your store.
- By default it will list 2 posts per blog
- This page is shown when selecting a date from the Blog Archive widget.
These Blog pages introduce some new concepts to the theme system. They allow for table-less designs on repeated items. It also introduces nested <ac:layoutarea>'s
A good example of the nested <ac:layoutarea>'s is the Blog Roll page. See example below of how a merge code in one <ac:layoutarea> pulls repeated data (such as blog posts or comments) from another <ac:layoutarea> into itself.
New Widgets Include
- Blog Archive
- This lists out all the years and months that contain posts.
When you click a month or year you will be taken to the BlogList page. Here it will show all the blogs and the posts that are in that month or year.
- Blog Drilldown
- This shows your blogs and acts similar to a Browse by Category Widget in drilldown mode.
- Blog Roll
- This widget mimics the Blog Roll page and features all of the same functionality of the page.
- It has its own layout that can be customized separate from the Blog Roll page.
- Uses:
- Showing new full posts on the homepage
- Listing just the titles of new posts in the left/right column
- Blog Tag Cloud
All of these widgets will render site-wide except for the tag cloud. The Tag Cloud widget will only render when viewing a blog roll or blog post.
If you wish for these widgets to only display in the left/right column on Blog pages you would need to add them to an <ac:templateoverridearea>.