Is this the most 'efficient' way of facilitating blogging?

Using Concrete / Help
1

I am using Concrete 9.3.9 with the Modena them for an eCards site, and I use the Blog as a monthly “new ecard designs” news page each month.

From the Dashboard > Sitemap > Full Site Map I add a Blog entry type page, then visit it. It has the banner, two-column layout and other foundational pieces as desired, and I then Add a Content Block and create the content. The format is basically an H1 line such as April 2026 eCard News, followed by three or four sections, one for each category of cards which had some new entries, and a strip or two of thumbnail images of the eCard cover designs. These are H2 level categories.

I now have a “look” of font family, sizes and styles and such that I like. To streamline new monthly or special news blog posts, I would like to add a Content Block, type in text and spacing such as:

This is the H1 post title

This is the first H2 category

**This is the second H2 category

And so on**

I would then apply the fonts and other attributes and save the Block to my clipboard to use on each new Blog post.

My questions are:

  • Is this the most efficient way to streamline consistent blog posts?
  • Are there any drawbacks to having many instances of content copied from the same saved clipboard block on a site?
  • Any hazards? For example — could some action ‘flush’ the clipboard and lose my ‘template’
  • Is there a more accepted/elegant way to do this in the Concrete world (I watched some tutorials for Concrete on YouTube but none seemed to touch this area, or perhaps did and I did not understand)

Thank you for any advice or pointers to doc/instruction on any better alternative!

2

Hi ArcticSon,

Sounds like you’re managing just fine with the tools you have but yes, there are other more elegant ways to do this. You’re right that deleting your template from the clipboard would prevent you reusing it again in future however you can of course just re-add it to the clipboard from a previously published page.

So for a blog post, you could use the page attribute block to display the date and author and the page title block to display the blog title; these can then be setup to be included by default on new blog pages (in /dashboard/pages/types click ‘Output’ to open the page type default, add the page attribute blocks and page title block, save and all new blog pages will start with those included, the content you added and in the order/layout you included them).

See the documentation here: Putting it All Together Create the Page Type :: Concrete CMS

If your ecard site posts are not suitable for this approach it is also possible to edit/add page types programmatically with the view.php which gives you complete control but obviously requires coding (drop me a message if you’d like a fixed cost to develop one).

Dave

3

Thank you, Dave! I will experiment with the page attribute block suggestions to see how it fits.

You may hear from me re: contracting for the other solution. It may ultimately save me the most time, let me delegate some work, etc. and be well worth doing!