Blog Posts

Introduction

We are using the Netlify CMS for blog posts. To access the editor, go to https://kodi-tv.netlify.app/admin. (this URL will change to https://kodi.tv/admin once we move everything into production). You will need to login with your GitHub credentials, and only team members who have write access to the kodi-tv repo can add or edit blog posts.

Workflow

When you first log in, you'll be presented with a list of existing blog posts, as you're looking at the Contents list. From here, you can search, sort, select - and then either edit a published post, or create a new one.

Adding a New Blog Entry

Once you have logged in, you can click the button labeled New Blog in the upper left part of the page. Blog posts have a title, publish date, author (optional), tags (optional, and more than one), featured image (optional), and body. The featured image can be uploaded when you create the post, or you can use any image that has been used in a blog post before.

A note about image sizes: To help give the blog index a consistent look, all images should be 1920px wide and at least 500px tall. Please name them something understandable. We already have a number of 903895035_u4895723084234e_823570234.jpg type files from the older blog, so let's not make it worse.

You can save posts at any time (but please see the section below on previewing a blog entry) and a post must be saved at least one before you can publish it. Once saved, to publish a post you set the status to READY and then select the PUBLISH NOW option from the publish menu. This will generate a series of commits to the main branch, and that will trigger a site build.

Previewing a Blog Entry

Any time you save an unpublished blog entry, Netlify will generate a special version of the site with the new post. When you save the post, you will see a link appear that says Check for Preview. Clicking that will ask Netlify if the preview site is done yet. If it is, the link will change to View Preview. It takes 5 - 6 minutes to build a preview, so you will need to be patient. Those build minutes count against our total build minutes, so please don't save every ten words, or you we will end up having to buy build minutes to make it through the month.

Editing a Published Blog Entry

Find the entry you want to edit and open it. Once you open an entry, you get the same editor you used to create a post. Once you save it, you again need to set the post status to READY and the use the PUBLISH NOW option in the publish menu.

Editing a Draft Blog Entry

When you save a blog post, but don't publish it, it will not appear on the initial contents list: this is purely a list of published articles.

Instead, go to Workflow at the top of the screen to call up posts in various stages of their lifecycle: Draft, In Review, or Ready (based on whatever status is set when editing a post).

Formatting Entries

The post editor gives you the choice of a WYSIWYG editor or raw markdown. Either gives the usual basic formatting: bold, italic, code blocks, numbered/bullet lists, image insertion, etc.

While editing, you have an optional preview pane (eye icon) that gives you a flavour of what the post will look like. I say "flavour", as there's no real live view until a post is published - at that point, things like CSS kick in and you'll get the finished article. Guidance here: don't be too clever with formatting, as it's unlikely to survive or emerge as you intended.