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Formatting your Sitefinity Blog Summaries

Friday, December 19, 2008

If you visit the main page of this blog you'll notice each blog post gets cut-off at 150 words.  This prevents one long blog post from monopolizing the entire front page.

Configuring Sitefinity to summarize each blog post is extremely easy.  However, in addition to summarizing your posts, Sitefinity also has some powerful filters that can be applied to your summaries.  These filters can be configured to automatically strip HTML tags.

In this article we'll explore how to make use of these features.

Switching the Display Mode for your Sitefinity Blog

Inside the Sitefinity Admin click Pages and locate the page where you've placed your Blog Posts control.  Select this page and click Edit this page.

Sitefinity Edit this page

Once in edit mode click Edit for the Blog Post control.

Sitefinity Blog Post Edit

Select List & Page for the Display Mode and then click I'm Done.

Sitefinity Blog Post Settings

This alone will configure Sitefinity to display a list of blog posts and create unique SEO-friendly URLs to each post.  However, there are many more options we can use to control how the blog summaries are displayed.

Customizing your Blog Post Summaries

Click Edit once again for your Blog Posts control.

Sitefinity Blog Post Edit

Now click Settings to view additional control options.

Sitefinity Blog Post Settings

Scroll-down and click select Summary for your blog list display mode.

Sitefinity Blog List Select Summary

Click the Set Summary link for the Summary option.

Sitefinity Blog Post Summary Settings

A box of details will expand.  Here you can configure the cut-off point

Then click Settings to set additional options.

Sitefinity Blog Post Summary Details

Here we can specify the number of words our blog post summary should display.  We can also configure Sitefinity to strip-out all or a selective list of HTML tags.  Using this out-of-the-box feature you can exert a lot of control over how your blog post summaries are displayed.

If you want even more control, feel free to customize the Blog Post ControlTemplates found in your web site's ~/Sitefinity/ControlTemplates/Blogs folder.

Posted by: Gabe Sumner
Tags Blogging

Comments  4

  • Alex Brinkman 12 Jun

    Thanks, this was helpful.  I just moved my site to sitefinity and was curious about the blog formatting options.  I had no idea baout the Blog Post ControlTemplates.  Thanks again.

  • Grant 12 Jul

    Is there any reason you can think of why these settings don't get saved when I apply them? For example, I am walking through this just as you have it and when I click "I'm Done", the settings are not persisted. I open the setting back up and they are blank again.

    Is there something I missed?

  • Gabe Sumner 12 Jul

    Hi Grant,

    Off hand, I can't think of a reason for this.  You might try completely removing the blog posts control from the page and then saving.  Then re-edit the page, drag a fresh blog posts control onto the page and go through the setup from scratch.

    In the past I've occassionlly run into strange problems that were magically fixed when I just started again from scratch.

  • Grant 12 Jul

    That did the trick.

    On a somewhat unrelated note, I have a question about search indexing. I apologize for cross-posting here, but I have the following problem:

    My site structure to a blog entry is as follows:
    http://mydomain.com/blog/09-07-12/BlogEntry1.aspx

    However, when I add the BlogIndex to my search index, it always uses this URL
    http://mydomain.com/blog/Default/09-07-12/BlogEntry1.aspx

    Blog.aspx is a page and there is no Default.aspx, which results in a 404. I noticed that the search indexing for your blog works as I want my blog search to work, so fill me in if you have time :)
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