Do you have blogs with many categories? If so, you might like this new feature that we have added to the Blog Module.

The blog module is very flexible and has several ways of showing the content.

Here is what you have been able to do with it so far:

1. Show the latest posts one after another in their entirety. This is typically configured to showing 5 or so posts and the reader will use buttons to navigate to next or previous 5 posts. The post list can be filtered by date ranges or a specific category.

2. Single post view allows you to set up a blog where each post has it's own direct URL and the view shows the full content of that post, one post at a time. This is a great set up where counting the number of page views is important such as for generating ad income revenue. Read more about our Advertisement injection here

3. Blog Summaries are used to show a short version of each post. It can include the first image and some of the text. The number of posts shown can be selected by the administrator and each post will typically link to the single post view described in number 2.

We have now added a fourth way of showing blog posts. It's called Blog Category Index.

4. Each index is a selection of categories in a specific order. Once you assign your categories to one or more indexes, the index view will then show a summary of each blog post in these category groups. The number of summary posts per category is configurable. 

Example:

Let's say you blog about food where you write about breakfast, lunch and dinner. Maybe you have categories for different types of dishes for each of those meal times such as smoothies, hot breakfast, cereals, etc. You can now set up an index and specify which categories belong to which index and link to it from the menu.

In our example, this would create an index page showing the title "Breakfast", with the category titles under that: smoothies, hot breakfast, cereals etc. Another index would be called Lunch and feature each of the different categories specific to this index. Under each category you would see a short summary of all the blog posts assigned to the category.

So the next time you post a new smoothie recipe and give it the category Smoothies, the index page Breakfast is automatically updated with this new recipe entry.

This is a great way to keep content organized as your blog grows. Your visitors (and you!) will have an easy way to find your content.

Our blog module is available in our Personal+ package and up. You can find more information about our modules, packages and pricing here.