It has been a while since I have done an XBlog post.  If you are not familiar with the tool,  XBlog is a blogging module for Sitecore.  This is something that I co-authored a couple years back and continue to maintain.  You can find on the marketplace at: https://marketplace.sitecore.net/Modules/X/XBlog.aspx .

XBlog was developed with the mindset that no solution is perfect.  It gives you a lot of tools as a baseline to build from.  In the very least you would probably update the CSS styling to fit your own site.  Out of box there are several renderings and in this post I wanted to quickly go through these to give you an inventory.

There are three primary renderings.  These control the main displays:

1. Blog Listing – The first display most will see coming to your blog.  This displays a most current date ascending list of blog posts.  The list is paginated and displays title, date, summary, and author information.
2. Blog Post –  As you would guess this is the actual post.
3. Author View – This view will display specific authors, a biography and a pagination list of their blog posts.

Beyond our primary renderings we have several helper / callout renderings.

1. Author List – Listing of authors either alpha sorted or by total blog posts.  Dependent on your configuration.
2. Category List –  List of categories with the total count of blog posts classified to each category.  This links to the blog listing and will filter list based on category selected.
3. OG Meta Data – Open Graph protocol for meta data.  Nothing is visible in this view.
4. Recent Blog – A list of most recent blog posts.  The total displayed is configurable in settings.
5. Related Blog – This view compares other blogs to find similarities in categories, tags, and authors.  Each type has a weight (number value) configured.  So if categories weight is 3 and the current blog and queried blog has 2 in common, then value is 6 (2 x 3).  This is added to the other two types to get the total sum.  Highest value is then displayed at the top of the list.  Total displayed also configurable.
6. Tag Cloud – This is a display of tags with the most used tags appearing in larger text.
7. Tag List – Listing of tags.  This links to the blog listing page and filters the list based on tag.
8. Text Search – As you would expect, this is a search box that submits back to the blog listing to filter on your search term.

The helper / callout renderings are assigned to each page template as they should be aligned for each page in most common cases.  You are more than welcome to modify these as needed, change the pages they are displayed on, add your own, or even just remove them.  Overall I encourage you to spend a few minutes reviewing each view, just so you can get an idea of how they work.  No blog is the same and you will more than likely be making some modification to make XBlog fit into your implementation.

• Sitecore
• XBlog