Am I right in thinking that the Blog Posts template in the new Elements Essentials pack will give me the base on which to create a Blog on my new Elements site (still to be finished and uploaded) similar to the one I have running on my existing and still running Rapidweaver Classic site (www.medlarpress.com). That blog was created on Poster2, which is, of course defunct as far as Elements goes. However I do it, I think I will have to copy and paste all of my old posts into the new Elements site. No real problem but a bit of a boring task.
I’m not quite sure, however, if the two new blog templates (Blog Posts and Blog Lists) will do that, or something similar. Perhaps there is some instruction I have missed somewhere . . .
By the way, I’ve tried the miniblog and though it works, find it difficult and un-intuitive for me to do! I’m getting a bit old you see . . .
Regards to all
Jon
I don’t think it’s just copy and paste, as I don’t think Poster2 uses Markdown. If you do it that way you’ll be doing a lot of manual work getting your CMS/post/.MD files correct. I outline a way to grab published text to Markdown with a Safari Extension (MarkDownload) in my book, which will give you Markdown text to copy, saving you some steps. I go even further, applying the correct YAML Frontmatter via a TypeIt4Me macro. If you’ve got a lot of posts to convert, you’ll want to use every automation technique possible, or else you’ll be doing it forever.
Thanks Thom,
Useful information for me to have a look at. Going forward though, my main problem is whether the new Elements templates work in a similar way to the old poster 2 ones in Classic. Those just worked fine by dropping in text and an odd image manually, then a bit of simple Rapidweaver formatting did the trick. Maybe I should forget transferring any old ones and just start something new . . .
The upcoming online CMS option might solve that problem better than Poster2 did, though I’m not sure about images.
The Elements CMS is a little tricky in that it isn’t just a blog service, it’s a content management system. That means that it has hooks and features that go beyond what most people would use for a dirt simple blog, which seems to be what you want.
Moreover, you might not be fully understanding one bit about how Elements works: you’re not going to be doing additional formatting in the CMS. Elements will be applying the Theme and your container/grid/flex automatically. The difference comes in the up-front cost versus the downstream “cost.”
As I and others have discovered, there’s a lot to consider and do in building out the design for CMS use. There are a ton of options even in the initial CMS implementation, and I’ll bet it gets more complex later. However, once you’ve done the design work, it really is “just write a post.” The optional online component has some additional formatting options (bold, italic, headers, pull-quotes, etc.) that’s done as you write your post, but there’s no work that needs to be done other than writing the post if you set up the CMS design properly.
Thanks again Thom,
Thought you might like to see what I believed what I was getting with the Essentials templates pack - which is shown on the Elements website - both ‘Blog Posts’ and ‘Blog Lists’. The advertised templates are as shown below, which all look very Wysiwyg:
The reality however, and what is actually in the pack is this (taken from my Elements project:
As you can see there is no mention of Blogs at all, just 3 CMS collections for the alleged ‘blog list’ (which is fine for those who know and love CMS) and there there is not even a ‘Blog Post’ template at all - despite being advertised as such. There are other fancy visuals for both the missing ‘Blog Post’ and the ‘Blog List’ templates which are, unfortunately as misleading.
Maybe you can see now why I was confused - perhaps Dan may like to comment . . .
Thanks again for your views!
Elements naming has been a problem for a long time. I’ve hounded @dan a few times about it. @ben changed Component names in the Microblog Project thinking it would make things clearer, but in my book I had to call that out and point out that the CMS refers to everything as a Collection, not Posts.
So, to help you:
- Blog Posts in the Store marketing are really Collection: Clean Image and Text in the Essentials Components.
- Blog Lists in the Store marketing are really Collection: Rounded Cards in the Essentials Components.
Realmac keeps getting confused in how they talk about things. The CMS is really a Content Management System, and as I point out in my book it can be used for articles, tables, and much more. However, the user demand has been for Blogs, which is a subset of what the CMS can handle. So when you ask Blog questions of Realmac you’ll get Blog answers, even though it is really just one thing the CMS can do. If you ask CMS questions you’ll get CMS answers.
But effectively, it’s the same thing.
