Blog feature adjustments

Great work on the update to start with and the other logo was much better then the new one. I do no that is personal, it had a more luxurious look.
I do have a question though.
I do no understand how I can change my index page.
I made my blog ahead before Sparkle 3 and I do want the index page to look exactly what I have now. How Do I go about it?


The first picture is how it is now and the second picture is how it looks in Sparkle 3 with the blog option.

Hello @Swedutch

You can customise the blog index page and style it exactly according to your wishes.
Maybe this page from the documentation can be a bit of a guide:

https://sparkleapp.com/docs/blog.html

Good luck! :four_leaf_clover:

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Found it!
Thanks. I am always a bit insecure and scared of messing up with new things.
Found it now!

Hello @Swedutch

Glad to hear you found it. :blush::+1:

I usually try out new things with a copy of my original Sparkle file so I don’t have to worry about messing up things. :blush:

But I know what you mean. :blush:

That is probably a good idea.
I always get excited to try something and end up with messing up my original.
Learning though!

Hello @Swedutch

Oh I know this kind of excitement very well. :grin:
Especially when I want to try something new …
Well, there is always “Time Machine”, in case you use that …

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Perhaps I am missing something here. I have just started using Sparkle and top reason would be the blog feature that I’m looking to implement into the website. I hear and see in the documentation the ability to adjust and create an index the way I wish to have it viewed. I’m looking for a little guidance on this because currently I only see the index option as having a list of blog posts with the next page showing the next number of “x” blog posts. What I want to see is a pretty regular and “normal” view of blog posts laid out in a quick and easy view of what’s recently been written. I’ve taken a screen shot of the travelicious template to show how I would like to see blog posts show on the website. Can this be done?

It currently can’t be done. The blog entries will be laid out vertically.

If you don’t use the blog feature you can create that layout. You create a summary page as you have shown, then a separate page for each full-length post.

Thank you for responding so quickly, Duncan. Is there documentation to help in understanding how to adjust a vertical section then? If I’m looking at the original question posted by @Swedutch, and the first page showing a vertically aligned summary view of the picture, script, and read more button, how can I make something like that. In a sense, maybe not a block of horizontally laid out posts, but vertically? Just something other than a long list? Or…if there is a plugin that helps facilitate a more feature rich blog section, do you have a suggestion there?

If you want summary view for blog posts, that’s what the index/rss summary feature is for:

https://sparkleapp.com/docs/blog.html

That is what I did before. Very happy with how it now works

@flychompy Hi, I did everything by hand every time I made a new blog.
So I had my blog pages separately and then I made my blog Index. Exactly how I wanted it to be.
Just a matter of copy and past really.
Was a hassle and I am very pleased with the blog option.
This is how my blog entry looks like now and I did that through Customize Index.

I still have to do some copy and pasting but it will put them on the right space in the index.

Hope this helps

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Duncan, will these feature be added soon? Maybe an option to have columns and number of posts per page still adjustable - so in the above example, 3 columns and 6 per page?

Thank you! After playing around with it, I am starting to understand the feature better with the customize index. I think what threw me off right away is when allowing the customization, it created an exact copy of the post and didn’t realize the index was automatically adjusting for the one post that might not have the summary and the next one that does. That’s my fault in expecting that the index was what I was trying to make a summary option for all posts instead of need for customization for each blog post separately.

The ability to have a different layout of the blog index is likely to be added. I don’t have a timeframe.

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Hi everybody! May be I didn’t get how to do it but I might need a little help on this one: My Blog index page does not create links to the individual blog pages. Is there anything I need to do for that? Help is greatly appreciated!

Hi Screen Shot 2020-11-18 at 19.17.50
The picture on the right with the pen, click on that one and the you can choose.
When you have your blog post is says full blog post.
When you choose view index you can fill that area with whatever you want people to see on your index.
Hope this helps. Play a little with it and you will see what I mean.
Good luck!

@Swedutch with you generously sharing your template, I started making a blog page prior to release of Sparkle 3 based on the shared template, except following an image and an introductory paragraph, I would have the rest of the entry as a PDF file which would open in a new tab on clicking “read more”. Now I need to know how to copy the entries to the style on Sp. 3. The documentation is sparse. A short tutorial by experts on Sparkle Blog would be very helpful.

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I would love this too!