Blog listing page controls/options

matttunney · ‎Apr 24, 2018

I've had a design passed to me which has customised content on the blog listing page.

This includes; a featured post or posts and a promotional section.

How can I provide content authors with the tools to easily set content options such as the above featured post(s)/promo content on a listing page?

I did try a solution for featured posts, adding a boolean on a post page. Whilst this worked there was nothing to stop a content author from setting every post as a featured post, making the feature pretty pointless.

Thanks

Phil_Vallender · ‎Apr 25, 2018

Hi @matttunney

Yeah, we see this quite a lot from designers who are not famialir with HubSpot.

Featured posts are easy to design, hard to develop, and of little impact in most cases.

I'm not a developer and other devs may have better solutions but I think the solution we went with last time was custom modules on the template that took a blog post URL as the input and display the post as 'featured'. But this does require the user to edit the template which is very undesirable.

Ideally, I recommend you go back to the designer and ask them to remove them, either all together or in favour of the supported recent/popular modules.

@Jsum did I miss anything?

Hope this helps.

View solution in original post

AJLaPorte_diagr · ‎Apr 25, 2018

HI @matttunney

The solution you mentioned of the boolean seems like the most optimal way to do this, but, as you stated it leaves it up the content authors to not tag every single item as featured.

Another way you can do this is to create a custom module (i'd recommend doing this in the new design manager beta as it will be a lot easier) that can be used on the listing page to control the featured posts.

You could then turn off the front end ability for content authors to edit the module and instead use permissions to grant a user(s) or content author(s) the ability to edit custom modules. Then from there, you could write out some directions on how they would modify this module in the design manager.

@Phil_Vallender also has a great point of using the recommend/popular modules though I would take caution with them as while they may provide functionality to accomplish this, you wouldn't have control over the "featured" ones.

In some instances like these, there isn't a definite way to create this without having to have some user reliance and providing instructions on how to do it (then just cross your fingers that the authors/clients follow them correctly).

-AJ