Compatibility:

WebSite X5 Evo and Pro

After setting up the Blog (see: How to create a Blog), you need to find ways to promote it, relying on strategies that can drag a wide audience to your articles, reading and possibly commenting and interacting with them.


A possible strategy is displaying a gallery of some of the latest published posts on the Home Page, so to invite to reading them. 


You can easily create this kind of gallery with the dedicated Article List Object: with this Object, you can in fact decide which articles must be included and display them with cards reporting some key details and making it possible to access the full articles. 


Let's see how to go about to get his result:


Set up the Blog and the Page where posts will be reported

There are some steps that have to be completed before you proceed:

  • First, you need to have a Blog ready with some Articles on Step 1 - Settings > Blog.
  • Then you need to have a Page ready on Step 3 - Sitemap where you are going to display the selected Blog posts.


Define the posts to be included in the Article List

Now, you are ready to start. With a single Article List Object, you can display a variable amount of posts: you don't need to know the exact number already. A presentation card will be automatically created for every included post, and it will be displayed on the selected page. 

  • On Step 3 - Sitemap, select the Page in question and add an Article List Object in the Cell you prefer of the page layout grid. 
  • Double click to open the Object you just added to access the settings window, and stay in the List section.
  • Choose if you want to select the articles manually or using categories and filters.
  • If you go for the Selection with filters, you can select a Category or an Author among the available ones:  you are reported only those already created in the process of writing articles. In both cases, you can activate the Recently Published Articles and define the time interval to be considered.
  • If, on the other hand, you go for the Manual Selection, you will find the full list of all Blog Articles, so you only need to click the ones you want to include (so that a check mark is displayed).
  • If you want to limit the number of items to be included in the Article List Object from the filtered items, enable the Maximum Number of articles option and type the limit number in the appropriate field.
  • Now the sorted articles are reported in the Displayed Articles list. You can arrange them using the Layout button and choose the kind of layout you prefer: Custom (in this case you freely move the articles with the Move up / Move down buttons), Title, Category, Author, Date and Random (in this case the arrangement changes every time the page is loaded).  In any case, you can decide to apply an Ascending (A->Z) or Descending (Z->A) order.


Define the card graphic style and link

Each item included in the Article List Object is presented through a card automatically created by the Program. Of course, you can completely customize it: you can intervene on the layout of the cards, their composition and even their graphic style. In this specific case, you find all the options to do so in the Article List Object > Settings window.



#tip - To better understand how to create and customize cards, see: What are Article Cards and how to customize them.