I watched the YouTube videos—thank you for those—and read through the documentation. If I understand correctly, the CMS is based on Markdown files.
That may be a deal-breaker for me. I had expected to create a reusable blog-page template and then customise each post as needed: modify sections, add additional images, videos etc
My impression is that a Markdown-based approach is fairly rigid because every article needs to follow the same structure. Is that correct?
More specifically, is it possible to write and structure each article freely, similar to Medium, and then have that content appear in the blog listing? Or does every post need to conform to a predefined Markdown template?
By sections do you mean sub-headings, if so, Markdown supports that.
Additional images: you can embed them.
Video: you can embed it (though that probably works best with a supported service such as YouTube or Vimeo).
Where the CMS falls down is when you want to use specific Elements Components within the blog post (you can still use them surrounding the blog post itself).
So the real question here is what exactly are you including in a blog post? From your initial question, I don’t see anything that can’t be in a post.
Hi Thom,
I understand markdown, used it before Elements.
I’m basically asking if we can write blog articles without pre defined layout (in the template md file that displays the individual blog) .
For instance can a blog post have title, header image and some short body text and other blog posts has the title, no header image, text with image, then an image then some more text and a video.
As I said I want to write as I could write in medium or Wordpress dragging dropping modules as I want.
I also did not understand this bit of your answer. Can you please clarify?
“within the blog post (you can still use them surrounding the blog post itself).”
Within reason, yes. You’re going to create a Post page for the blog. That page can pull out things from the YAML frontmatter. So typically, most of use that a bit like this:
{{item.title}}
{{item.date}} by {{item.author}}
((item.shortversion}}
((item.body}}
Each of those things can be styled differently. So you can have a big title and a faint date/author, a different font for shortversion, and then the body is styled using your Theme.
As to the “other blog posts has…”, this is done on your overall “latest blog posts” page. You have a lot of possibilities there, though it gets a little tricky with the placeholder codings. A lot of us are fiddling with that page on our sites, particularly now that tags are working.
So to have a different Post (blog) I need to type in blog-article-4 in markdown files and it will have a different content order (text, image ,image , text etc). Then this will be displayed thanks to ((item.body}}. Is that right?
If you’re doing a blog with lots of media and embedded URLs, that’s where you want to use the online editor for creating new Blog posts. It’s just drag and drop for images at that point, basically (as opposed to having to specifically type the correct Markdown code for an image each time). When the CMS first came out for Elements, we had to do a lot of manual work every time we created a new post (e.g. the YAML frontmatter). Now, you define that once, then do all your posting with a very capable online editor that understands how to do all the proper entry and formatting behind the scenes.
This is where you’d really benefit from watching the video’s @dan and @ben have created about the CMS. Your questions so far have been answered before, and with clear demonstrations.
A note to @dan : This isn’t even close to the first time I’ve had to answer newcomer questions about blogging with Elements (and a lot of those have happened outside this forum). Somehow you really need to promote a “blogging is easy” video, right up front on your landing page and again here in the forum.
Basically: it’s easy to blog with Elements. Here’s the 1-2-3.
Create the basic structure in Elements CMS with a blog list page, a blog post page, and one Markdown file of content.
Enable the online editor.
Blog away.
Want to style that blog differently? Change theme and twig components as desired.
Too many new-to-possibly-trying-Elements folks are balking, because right now they think it’s “too hard” to create a blog and go. Don’t keep pointing at microBlog, either. That doesn’t have images and a bunch of other things, and telling someone how to add them immediately drops them into YAML and twig, neither of which would be familiar to them, so: “too hard.”
It is a bit self advertisement, what I am usually not doing. But you should have a look at ShortCodes. It is doing for what you are asking - if I understood it correct.
It is made to do things you know from Wordpress and can integrate complete photo galleries with the lightboxes, self hosted videos, audio and all kind of elements components what are available.