Using a blog powered by Magento is beneficial in any case and especially great if you have a chance to add relevant posts to product pages.
All these and above are the functionality provided by the previous version of our Blog extension for Magento 2. Today, we announce a new version of the extension that has a lot of new valuable functions on board.
Blog 2.4 Features
Social Media Sharing Options
Sharing official blog posts in social media is quite popular among customers and visitors and may be considered as a public approval of your content strategy. Still, if the shared content is indistinct and unattractive, visitors may neglect the provided option.
So, in order to avoid such a negative influence, the latest version of the extension supports the Open Graph and Twitter Cards markups.
Open Graph Support
The Open Graph markup includes the following tags:
- “og:site_name” content=”Store title” – store title;
- “og:type” content=”article” – the type of marked-up object. ‘Content’ in this particular case;
- og:locale – the locale to be used;
- og:image – an image representing blog post;
- og:title – blog post title;
- og:description – blog post short description;
- og:url – canonical blog post URL.
Twitter Cards Support
Twitter successfully recognizes and uses the Open Graph markup and the above tags as well. Still, we added two more twitter card options to your social sharing opportunities – ‘Twitter site account’ and ‘Twitter post author account’.
The options are available on the blog post editing page and in the general configuration section.
So, you can either provide them for all the posts using the ‘Default Twitter site account’ and ‘Default Twitter post author account’ general setting options or specify them for a particular article with the ‘Twitter site account’ and ‘Twitter post author account’ options available on the blog post editing page.
UI Improvements
Post Images
From now on, Magento admins are able to add title images to posts displayed on the frontend and improve the extension’s backend with the above images used in the Posts grid.
You can either take images from the uploaded media or add them from your device. You can also provide them with titles and alt texts.
The Image Upload Functionality
Above the featured image block we’ve also provided you with the hints for using different sizes of images for particular social media and maximally allowed sizes of images in pixels and bytes accepted by the extension.
Categories in Sidebar
The latest Blog also allows you to add Categories to Magento sidebar. Follow Stores > Configuration > Aheadworks Extensions > Blog > Sidebar to enter the configuration section.
New Sidebar Options
As you can see, the configuration contains two options:
- Display Categories List in a Sidebar – enables the functionality;
- Maximum Number of Categories to Display – determines the number of visible categories by default. All other categories are hidden beneath the ‘Show X More’ link.
URL Enhancements
URL Configuration
For SEO purposes, you have an opportunity to alter the structure of your URLs. You can use URL’s with or without categories. The option is located in the SEO section of the general Configuration page.
You can choose between the following URL structures:
- com/blog/article;
- com/blog/category/article.
If the latter one is selected, you can also specify a canonical URL on the blog post editing page.
Canonical tag
The canonical tag is required in case the post is assigned to several categories. This way, you need to determine a Canonical Url to avoid duplicate content. The Canonical URL option allows you to choose among the categories the post is assigned to.
As soon as the canonical URL is provided, the extension will add the canonical URL tag to the corresponding blog post page.
Other Features
Blog Post Viewing Permissions
If you want to restrict access of particular customer groups to some posts, you can use the ‘Enable post for customer groups’ option. The provided field contains all the existing Magento customer groups, where the ‘All groups’ option is selected by default.
Bluefoot
The last new feature of this update is provided for the Magento Commerce users. The Bluefoot Magento page builder is now available for them within our blog post WYSIWYG editor.
Conclusion
The above feature scope proves extensive work performed for this latest release to improve the blog management process in a Magento 2 based store.
Blog 2.4 is already available for purchase. To see it in action and explore its features in more detail, please view the demonstration store and read the User Guide.
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