HOW-TO: Posting in your Blog in MODx
Okay, so you have a new Blog with MODx. How do you post in it?
This is your admin screen:
If you click the plus sign next to “Blog” then you can see the posts that have already been written. You can either duplicate one of those and just type over it or create a new one. For the purposes of this tutorial, we’ll make a new one.
If you click on the square icon next to “Blog” (see the ugly brown arrow pointing to it?) then you will see this Context Menu:
You want to choose the top option, “Create Resource here” which also has an ugly brown arrow pointing to it.
All right, that will bring you to this screen, and I’ve filled in the different form fields here with descriptive text, so look at the following screen shot:
starting at the top, you want to fill in the fields as instructed. If you do not put in a summary, then the first portion of your post will be used as the summary for the post. You might want to do this for instance if you want an image to appear in the summary list of articles. Do not check “Show in menu” If it is checked then uncheck it.
When you are finished with your post, make sure you choose whether or not to show the comments on this post (check box) and add tags for the post. Leave the stylesheet field alone (it will probably not be in your form, it is just in mine as the main admin so I can change it easily) :
But wait! How do you put an image in?
See the little tree in the second row in your Rich Text Editor? It is the first icon. That is the image button. To insert an image, you click it and you will get this screen:
Notice the three tabs along the top. General, Appearance and Advanced. We’ll leave advanced alone for now and come back to the appearance tab. But first you have to pick your image.
If you click the square icon next to the “Image URL” field then you will bring up the Image Library screen where you can browse and choose your image. It also has an uploader at the bottom of the screen, you can load new files into the image library with the uploader.the image library screen looks like this:
after you choose your image, make sure you put in a title and description for it. You can also click the Appearance tab and align the image so the text wraps around it by choosing “left” or “right” You will have space preprogrammed in around your images, but you can add more if you like with the Hspace and vspace fields under the appearance tab in the image menu. The Appearance tab looks like this:
Hit “Update” when you’re ready. If you need to edit this later, just select the image and click the tree button in the Rich Text Editor and you can come back to this screen. To delete an image, you just select it and hit “backspace.”
What about adding links?
You highlight the text you wish to link and click the button that look like a chain in your Rich Text Editor. See below:
if you want to link to another site, enter the url in the box, make sure you include the “http://” . You probably want that to open in a new window, so choose that from the dropdown next to”Target” Then click insert.
To link to a page within your site, choose from the link list:
This will put an odd code in the url field, it will look like this: [~6~] and the number is the same as the number next to that page in your document tree. It is the id number for the resource. Click insert.
Finally, you can also link to doc files or pdf’s. To do that you will click the little square button next to the url field and that will bring up the file browser. There is an uploader at the bottom of this screen that you can use to upload files. Then just click the file you wish to link to. The file browser looks like this:
then, as before, you click “insert” and you are done! link created!
You can save a post at any time, you just need to make sure it is not published. It is a draft and is not accessible until you publish it.
There are different ways to publish a post. You can set a date for a post to publish or unpublish. You can also choose “publish” from the context menu (remember that?) in the document tree. If you use that option, your post will automatically go to Twitter. If you set the date for publish to -today- the post will be published immediately.
A resource that is not published will have an italic title in the document tree.
A resource that is not shown in the menu but is published will be grayed out but not italic in the document tree.
A resource that is shown in the menu will be black and not italic in the document tree.
You want your finished blog posts to be published and not shown in the menu,
This is the tab where you will find the date options for publishing a post:
The main fields where you entered the article is under “General” ..you want “Settings” if you want to set the date for publishing.
Click Save and you are finished. You can preview your post from the context menu (click the square icon next to the resource in the document tree) The post will have the managers from your slide shows showing unless you log out of the admin. But if you do then it should look something like this:
Hopefully this has helped you!
