How to write a blog post within the iPro CMS

Having a blog on your website is a great way to generate unique and engaging content that will inspire your guests and create desire to travel to your location.

A blog post should be fun, engaging and thoughtful.  Some posts maybe more serious, but the idea is they give an insight into your personality and what a guest can experience while traveling with your company.

Please follow our step by step guide on how to use the iPro CMS to write your blog post.  It is assumed that you have access to our integrated blog. However if this is not installed you will need to upgrade your system, please note that there is a charge for installing the blog of £297 + vat.

How to create your first blog post

1/ Firstly you will need to navigate to the CMS, then on the 'Content' node you will see there is a tab called 'Create Blog Post', from here you will click the link 'Click to Create'

This will go ahead and create your very first blog post.

2/ You will now be presented with a blank form and the post will be called 'New Post'

So the first thing we will want to do is give the post a name, so click on the tab called 'Properties' and then in the name field enter the name of your post.  Then click 'Save & Publish'  which is this icon:

3/ We can now update the content for our blog post, on the first tab 'Content' we have Title, Summary, Description & Main Image.

Here is how it looks on the blog page

Title

Will display over the main image you select

Description

This will display on the right hand column and will be below the main image, this description box is a HTML editor so you can update the font style as required, upload images and create internal links.

4/ To add an image to your blog post, click the image icon and then select the image from your media section or upload a new one.  Ensure you have moved your cursor to the correct location before clicking this icon.

Choose your image, or you can click 'Create New' to upload an image.  When ready click 'Insert' to insert the image into your blog post.

The image will be inserted where you left your cursor, so it is important that you have the cursor in the right location before you click 'Insert Image'

5/ You will also want to link your blog post to related blogs or pages within your website, to do this you can use our internal linking tool.  Firstly highlight the word(s) you would like to link and click the chainlink icon.

You can then choose to link to an external URL or an internal URL, if an internal URL as in this example use the site tree to click on the page you would like to link too.

6/ Once you have images and your links updated you can move onto the tab 'Post Info'

Author

Here you want to choose who the author is, simply click on their name and it will move them to the right hand side.  If you have selected the wrong author you can click the red cross next to their name to remove them.

Post Date

This will default to today, but if you want to back date the post you can update this to the date of your choice

Category

Currently this is not active on the website

Tags

This is an important area, that will allow you to group blogs into related articles.  In this example post we have Halloween and Days Out, so if someone clicks that area of interest we want this blog to be shown.

Here is how it looks on the blog page

7/ Once you have completed this section you can set your Page Title and Meta Description on the 'SEO' Tab.  This tab is specifically for telling the search engines what this page is about, your page Title is there to inspire people to click on your listing.

8/ The blog post summary box will be available on your homepage, Tag Pages and the Author page.  The content will display as follows:

9/ When adding the tags to your post, you can see they are added to the summary page as well as the blog post page.

This page has been filtered to all posts which are tagged as 'Days Out'