Blogs are a great way to engage with your users, you can let them know what's going in in the community, tell them about upcoming events, or share stories and resources to inspire them.

In this article:

To create a blog post, you need to have a page in the community for your blog. For more information on how to add a blog page, check out our guide to customising your navigation menu.

If you have a blog page in your community, go to the page and click Create new post to open the blog post editor.

If you have started a blog post and saved it as a draft, you can click on SHOW DRAFTS to edit your draft instead of creating a new blog post.

The blog editor provides space for you to add a title to your blog post and to add the content. You can use the formatting buttons at the bottom of the content box to add things like headings, lists and images.

When you have finished editing your blog post you can choose to Publish it immediately, or to save it as a draft. The default setting will automatically publish your blog post, if you would like to save it as a draft, click on the drop down field that says Publish now and click on Save to Drafts to finish.

The grey panel on the left hand side allows you to add even more to your post including: sorting the post into a category, associations with ideas or challenges and attachments.

Blog categories are a way of sorting blog posts into common themes. If there are categories in the blog, you can choose to add your post to one of the categories using this drop down field.

If you'd like to write a blog post about an idea or challenge, you can use this area to let users know to which idea or challenge it relates. Start typing the name of the idea or challenge to see a list that you can choose from.

If you are looking for an idea that you would like to associate with your blog post, select 'Ideas' and if you are looking for a challenge, select 'Challenges'. When you can see the idea or challenge that you're looking for, hover your mouse over it and then click the Add button.

When you publish your idea, the associated challenge/s and idea/s will be shown as links at the bottom of the blog post.

You can attach images and other files to your blog posts, when the post has been published they will be shown as thumbnails, underneath the text of the post.

The first image that you attach will be used to represent the blog post on the Standard home page.

If you want an image to be in line with the text of your blog post (ie not a thumbnail) you should add the image in the blog editing window (where you type the text).

To add attachments to your blog post:

1. In the grey panel on the left-hand side, click Attach files and select a file from your computer.

2. Alternatively drag a file from your computer and drop it into the box with a dashed line.

3. When your files have finished uploading, you can publish your blog post.