Blogs
Markup Factory includes a basic blog that can be used to post articles on your website in various formats. These articles can be displayed as a traditional blog, as news updates, press releases, or other formats. You can enable or disable comments on these articles and display brief categorized versions of them throughout your website.
You can configure your blog in the "Options" section of the Blog administration area.
Drafting a Blog Post
Blog Posts are stored in several statuses as described below:
- Draft means the post is saved in your drafts, but is not published to the live blog.
- Awaiting Approval means the post has been saved and will be published once you have approved of it.
- Published means the has been published and is available through the live blog.
- Archived means that the post will be stored in the article archive and will not be displayed on the blog homepage of your website.
To draft a new Blog Post or Article:
- In the "Blog" section of your administration area, click "Draft Post"
- Provide a title for the article and type or insert the content of the article
- Select the appropriate Status for the article
- Save the article by clicking "OK" or "APPLY"
- Once you've saved the article, click on the "Post Categories" tab to select categories to add the post to
Categories
You can set up as many categories as you like by clicking on the "Categories" link in the "Blog" section of your administration area.
RSS
Articles posted to your blog are automatically syndicated via RSS. The default RSS feed is listed on your Blog Dashboard. You can also access an RSS feed for a single category of blog posts by passing in a Category ID in the query string.
For instance, if you have a category "News" with a category ID of "324", you can access an RSS feed for all posts in this category at the URL: http://www.yourdomain.com/blog/rss?iCategoryID=324.
Spam Prevention
Markup Factory has built-in comment spam prevention. You can enable this spam prevention by activating your Akismet account and entering your Akismet API Key into the "Settings" page of your Markup Factory installation.
Entering an Akisment API Key will enable Akisment Spam Protection on certain forms within your site. To obtain a Akismet API Key, create an account through wordpress.com. You will receive your API Key in the confirmation email. If you have a commercial site, you'll need to purchase a commercial API key from Akismet.com.
Spam caught by Akismet will be placed in the "Blocked Spam" section of your Blog. You can view these blocked comments by clicking on the "Blocked Spam" link in your Blog administration area. Akismet is very accruate and rarely detects real comments as spam, but you may mark blocked comments as "not spam" by clicking on the specific comment. You can also delete all blocked spam by clicking the "empty spam box" link.
Functions
You can use various functions to output blog articles, article lists, and archive lists. See the Template Engine documentation to see more about how you can use these functions throughout your website.