To create a new collection of articles/posts, follow the steps below in the Admin Console:

1. Choose Components > Articles/Blogs.
2. Choose the name of the Group that will own this blog.
3. Click the "New Article Group/Blog" button.
4. Complete the fields as follows:

• Main tab: 
  • Name: This will be the name for your overall blog (e.g. "Jim's Blog" or "XYZ Corp Press Releases")
  • Intro: Enter a brief description of the blog here. Depending on the design of your particular site, this intro may appear at the top of your blog or on a headlines/summary page.
  • CSS Styles: (for advanced users) enter custom style declarations here in standard Cascading Style Sheet syntax. Any styles entered here will override the master CSS for your Website.
  
  
• Collection tab:
  • Number of posts to show initially: This setting controls how many posts are displayed on the "home" page for this blog. It is common to show about 5-10 "headlines" of your recent blog posts.
  • Default Collection page: specify the page in your group which contains the layout for your blog headlines. This is where people will initially view the most recent blog headlines (title and intro text from your recent posts). NOTE: you will need to create a page with the soHeadlines tag and then specify that page in this dropdown. 
  • Individual article/post page: specify the page in your group which contains the layout for your blog posts. This is where people will go to read the full article, when they click on one of your blog headlines. NOTE: you will need to create a page with the soArticle tag and then specify that page in this dropdown.
  • Which type of collection is this? Choose Blog if you wish to accept comments, show links and trackbacks, etc. For articles, press releases, and other "one-way" communication, choose Article Group.
  • Allow RSS Syndication: Choose "Yes" on this option in order to let your readers subscribe to your blog. Each time you enter a new post, they will be able to read it via any standard-based RSS aggregator tool (i.e. they won't have to revisit the website in order to get your latest blog postings).
  • Show Permalink: This will display a standard Permalink below each of your posts. This provides a useful way for people to link to your posting even after it disappears from your "latest posts" area.
  • Trackbacks: This allows you to track other blogs/websites that link to your blog (and vice versa). Choose "Yes" on this option to display an automatically-generated Trackback below each of your posts.
  • Allow Public Comments: Choose "Yes" if you would like your readers to be able to add comments to each of your posts.
  • Require users to log in before posting comments: This is normally a good idea; it allows you to better track who typed each comment on your blog.
  • Send an email alert when someone adds a comment: You can receive an alert as soon as comments are posted to your blog. Choose "Yes" and type your email address in the field. Click the "Add Email" button to add your email to the alerts list. You can also change/delete/add other emails to the alerts list.
  
  
• Topics tab: Use this tab to add new topics, and/or associate existing posts with topics. For more information, see Working with Topics.
  
  
• Contact tab: Use this tab to specify the main contact or author of the blog. You can also have this information display as the default contact for each of the individual blog posts. This section allows you to enter in various info about the blog contact: name, title, email, phone, fax, an image, and description. 

Displaying your blog

After you have created a blog, you'll need to display it on the website. Read more about how to display your blog on the website.

Blog Terminology

RSS is a family of web feed formats, specified in XML and used for Web syndication. RSS is used by (among other things) news Web sites, weblogs, schools, and podcasting. The abbreviation is variously used to refer to the following standards:- Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0) - Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0) - RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0) Web feeds provide web content or summaries of web content together with links to the full versions of the content, and other metadata. RSS, in particular, delivers this information as an XML file called an RSS feed, webfeed, RSS stream, or RSS channel. In addition to facilitating syndication, web feeds allow a website's frequent readers to track updates on the site using an aggregator.

A permalink is a term used in the world of blogging to indicate a URL which points to a specific blog entry. A permalink is accessible even after the entry has passed from the front page and into the blog archives. The term is a portmanteau made by contracting the phrase "permanent link". The permanent URLs created are often simple and human-readable to ease the process of linking to a particular entry and are designed within blogging software to remain unchanged indefinitely so as to help prevent link rot. The practice is utilized by mainstream news and other types of websites as well, although the term permalink is most common within the blogosphere.

TrackBack is a mechanism for communication between blogs: if a blogger writes a new entry commenting on, or referring to, an entry found at another blog, and both blogging tools support the TrackBack protocol, then the commenting blogger can notify the other blog with a "TrackBack ping"; the receiving blog will typically display summaries of, and links to, all the commenting entries below the original entry. This allows for conversations spanning several blogs that readers can easily follow.Blogging software (such as SiteOrganic) that supports the TrackBack protocol displays a "TrackBack URL" along with every entry. This URL is used by the commenting blogger, whose software will send XML-formatted information about the new entry to this URL. Some blogging tools are able to discover these TrackBack URLs automatically, others require the commenting blogger to enter them manually.