How To Create A Custom Blog in Wix | A COMPLETE Guide 2021

what is going on wix nation are you fired up because i’m fired up mps here from wix training academy and i’m fired up because today i’ll be bringing you a complete guide on actually building a custom blog here in which which is some incredible new functionality that i would really encourage you to use and hey if you’re just joining us for the first time thank you very much for watching the content if you haven’t already make sure you smash
that subscribe button and press those bell notifications on so that way you never miss any content here on the channel and you’ll instantly plug into the largest wix training community on the internet we’re only continuing to grow thanks to you and i would love to have you here we as a community would collectively love to have you involved and i am excited to deliver today’s content to you so without further ado i’m gonna do something that’s
pretty tough for me i’m gonna shut my mouth for a second and allow you to jump into today’s content okay guys so we’re here in our wix editor i’m starting with a blank template to show you kind of how this is gonna work so i’m gonna break this video into a couple different sections one we’re gonna actually add our blog two i’m gonna show you how to access the database for the blog and then third we’re actually going to design the blog and when i
say design i mean i’m gonna show you the functionality portion of designing your blog so that way you can actually take that functionality make it work and then you design it how you would like your blog to look and that’s exactly how this video is going to be broken into today so first and foremost as i mentioned we are going to go ahead and add our wix blog because no matter what even though we are building a custom blog we still need to add
the which blog in order for this to work so what you’re going to do is you’re going to see start blogging here in the editor you’re going to click that you’re going to click add now this is then going to work its magic and while it’s working it’s magic it’d be much appreciated if you could hit that like button right down below this video and now you see it gives you an option do you want just the wix blog or wix blog plus a members area so
essentially the difference here is the blog is just a blog the wix blog plus the members area gets you building more community within your blog which i always am a proponent for as you can see me building wix nation i’m a proponent for building wix nation so i’m gonna go ahead and press wix blog plus members area and again this is your preference it really has zero impact on today’s video i’m gonna press next which is gonna work its magic while
it’s doing that you guys can head over to wixtrainingacademy.com that is the website for wix nation if you click join the academy you can get free access to which training content i’m also launching a three-day workshop over there for building an online course in wix so if you want to get involved in that you can also do that but just head over to wishtrayacademy.com click join the academy and get free instant access to a bunch of awesome witch
training content and you’ll join the community um so we’ve got our blog loaded up here and this gives us our standard which blog format so i’m really not going to be touching too much on the standard wix blog format today because i’m going to go into more of the architecture of being able to create a custom blog on wix so a couple things you do need to note though with the standard wix blogs you’ve got your normal settings so if you click that
settings tab you can still change or display your um let’s let it load you can change your display you can change your layout you can change your design so what i do want to make clear is theoretically you can take this current um which blog that they provide you and make it custom you can show certain information you could change the design of it and that’ll make it more custom but you are still limited to the layouts that wix provides you so
you don’t have a complete amount of customization over what your blog page looks like what your uh blog as a whole showcasing your whole showcase looks like your category pages stuff like that whereas that would be different when you create a custom witch blog you’re not confined to just the layout that the standard which blog offers you but i did want to make it clear that you do totally have the ability to customize this standard which blog at
least a good amount just not totally and completely so just keep that in mind when you’re deciding whether or not you want to go with a full custom blog or not i like i said you could come in here change design the menu the post the text the font all that good stuff then what you’re going to see is you’re going to see managed posts this is going to be your standard whether you have the regular which blog the standard or you create a custom one
because what’s going to happen is all of your blog posts are going to go to a database here in wix and from that point you’ll be able to customize how that data is displayed okay so what i mean by that is you can see all of these blog posts right here would show on the standard blog just like they’re gonna show on your normal or on your custom which blog so to create a new post you would press create post and then you can come in here and you can
work your post magic i’ve done a video already on creating a standard blog in wix and all of this stuff is the same i’ll link it in the cards above but here’s where we start to differ okay so here’s where i’m going to show you the different approach that is creating a custom witch blog which means in order to do that we have to activate our velo development tools and then we’re actually going to utilize repeaters and connecting data elements to
customize the design and look and feel so we added our which blog we added our members area and this is what the standard looks like but let’s just say we don’t want the standard we are going to go ahead and create our own style right so what we would do is we would add a new page to our site menu we could just add a blank page and then once that loads uh for now i’ll just write blog new on it all right and then once we’ve got that loaded what
i’m gonna do is i’m actually first and foremost going to add a strip because strips just make your life so much easier and it keeps your regular editor uh more responsive with the elements so what you’re going to want to do is you’re now going to want to come through here and design what you would imagine you would like your blog to look like so for instance um let’s just say we’re going to have a featured image on all of our blog posts and you
want to highlight one featured blog post and you can change this how often as you like you can make it the um the most recent blog post every time so let’s just say i upload from computer or here i’ll actually go take an image from one of my other wix accounts alright which my website there we go and then i’ll pull the wix master class image so i’m going to pull this image i’m going to put it here on the page now all this image is going to be is
a placeholder image why because this is going to act as our featured image for a blog post okay but the reason i say it’s going to be a placeholder image is because this is going to be responsive which means once we connect it to our database it’s going to change depending on the new post that comes in every single time so this image will actually change and then over here on the left and everything i’m adding here right now as far as design and
text wise is all going to be responsive but it’s going to be a placeholder right now just to keep the place of the design so we get the architectural design of what we want so i’m going to come in here i’m going to add header 3 and i’ll put it about right here i’m going to style it up a little bit for you guys just because why not and then i’m just going to say blog title and then i’m going to add a paragraph i’m going to line it up i’m gonna
extend the paragraph a little bit and i’m going to say after i change the font here blog post description now you can choose how much you actually want shown here okay you can choose how much text you actually want shown here and i’ll show you how that works um but i would encourage you to put the title and a little blog description and then what we’re going to do is we’re going to add a button and i’m just going to add this one right here and
we’ll add this down here and we’ll match it up with the bottom of the picture and then we’ll have this button say read more and what that button is going to do is it’s currently acting as a placeholder but when that’s clicked it’ll allow them to go view the blog post okay so now we’ve got um a featured post up top now here’s what i like to do for the next portion what i’m going to do now is add a repeater because now what i’m going to have is i’m
going to have a repeater display all of the other blog posts not the featured one this is like our core featured blog post and the way it’s going to work is it’ll feature the newest blog post added each time a new one’s added and then i’m going to add repeaters so that way we’re able to display additional blog posts after but we don’t have to change the design and do what we did here each time watch so if we go to add and then we go to lists and
grids i’m going to just pick one of these repeaters i’m going to pick this one right here okay i’m going to drag this down here perfect so now i’m going to switch this stuff around a little bit you can see if i make a change on one on this top repeater it’ll delete that design all the way down because how repeater works is that the design will stay uniform it’ll stay the same but the data is dynamic so the data will change and i’ll show you how
to connect the data here in a few moments so that way it will change right so i’m going to delete this line too and then i’m just going to make this little paragraph here i’m going to change once again our font and change it to ladle light drop the text down a little bit and then i’m going to add and i’ll show you how this works a blog title again and i’m going to update the font here now watch since i added that there it gets added all the way
down but again it says heading four here in blog title here because each of these will show different data in it each of these will show different data but i don’t want this blog title hugging that close and you know what i’m actually going to center the blog title and then i’m going to copy this read more button and i’m going to paste it down here because we want to give people way to be able to click to read more and then this will be our uh
like featured image the blog image right so now we’ve got our custom blog design now here’s the deal i preface this in all of my recent videos i’m not a designer this is ultimately it’s not horrible but it’s a pretty crummy design just because there wasn’t much thought put into the actual physical design i’m showing you the architecture what you’re going to want to do is you’re going to want to design your blog exactly how you want it to look but
now the next step that i’m about to show you is really the key to make this entire thing possible so as long as you follow along and watch this next step you can design and change and customize your blog in any way shape or form because you’ll know exactly how to make sure the data is dynamic and change accordingly so now what we’re going to do is we’re going to open up our velo development tools we’re going to turn on dev mode we’re going to let
those tools load up and while they’re loading up you can go ahead press that like button or head over to wix trainingacademy.com and click join the academy also there’s a card above for you to do that i’m gonna minimize and i’m gonna minimize that as well okay so now that our velo tools are activated what we need to do is if you go over here to content manager you’ll notice because we have our blog and it’s published and we have those sample
posts in our blog uh velo has automatically created a blog post blog categories and also members badges and private members data databases so if we click on posts from the blog portion of ello here’s what you’ll see you’ll notice a few things once our database loads up here we’ll let it load it’s going to fetch the data and then you can see it shows all the aspects of your blog post so you’re able to use all these individual fields when
developing your custom blog you can show the title the date the cover image categories plain text and excerpt hashtags view count all of these different things you can display now i only chose to display title excerpt and cover image plus a link to the post page url that’s what i decided to display but what you’re now going to need to do is you’re going to have to connect the data to these elements on this new blog page now to do this what you’re
going to do is you’re going to go to content manager you’re going to go to add content elements and you’re going to add a data set to your page once you add a data set to your page by the way this is invisible so when the website’s published people won’t be able to see this little thing here you’re going to click settings you’re going to connect it to a collection we’re going to connect it to the blog post collection we’re going to leave it on
read only and then you can actually choose the number of items to display here so how many posts you want to show on this page by the way this featured post as i mentioned is going to show your most recent blog post um so if you want it to show 20 blog posts it’ll show 20 blog posts here on this page so this repeater will go down until there is theoretically 19 since one is shown up here and then you can also excuse me sort your data set as well
so you can choose whether the blog posts show new to older old to new or you can add other sorts as well you can choose the published state you can choose the most liked as to show for a certain blog post you could show based off of comment count you can choose all these different sorting features but once you have the data set added what you’re gonna have to do is you’re gonna have to first click on your first element and you’re gonna press this
little connect to data button we’re going to it connects to the post data set this data set and text connects to title that’s our blog post title next one down our blog post description we’re going to press connect to data and then text connects to on this one excerpt because it’s going to show in a little excerpt of our blog then we’re going to click off and you’ll see it says uh connected to data you’ll see it turns green successfully connected
over here we are going to press connect to data and this one’s going to be a couple uh parts image source connects to that’s going to be our cover image that’s the field it corresponds with in the database and then we want link connects to and then we’ll want this one to be post page url so if people click this image it takes them to the blog post the post page url we are going to do the same thing for the button we are going to press connect to
data and we are going to say click action connects to and we want this to click to post page url so that way when someone clicks it it takes them to the blog post page bingo bango boom now we’ve got our featured section set we are going to do the same exact thing down here we are going to come in here to our repeater except this time what’s going to happen is up here this is the only thing that will change and this will stay that design whereas
down here this will keep a uniform design but it’s going to change each of these little sections are going to change and show a different blog post so if we do the same thing we’ll connect the data we want this to connect to the post data set and text connects to title blog title then we’ll do our cover image and we’re going to connect to data and we’re going to say image source connects to cover image and then link connects to post page url then
we’re gonna do the same thing over here for our description connect to data text connects to excerpt and then for our button connect to data and click action connects to post page url now if i go ahead and press save on this and i press preview you’ve got yourself a custom blog you can see that it now this featured one also shows down here the way you can avoid the featured one showing down here is if you wanted to you can add an additional data
set and only connect the elements up here to that data set and you can add a certain sort to show only a featured blog post so for instance i’m just going to show you real quick after this so now you can see all of our blog posts are added down here again i’m not going for design points here guys i’m just going to show you the functionality and then if you click on read more it’ll actually take you to the blog post page where you can then read
more about it and bingo bingo boom people can comment and they can read more and if we had a menu up here which i don’t i didn’t add one just because i wasn’t showing you that we can press back to that blog page but if we go back to the editor um so by the way guys that like that’s how you create the custom blog but what i want to show you that’s i think important to note is that if we go back to blog new um the only other thing i could tell you
is if we went to content manager we went add content elements added another data set what we could do is we could change the settings we’ll connect it to the posts we’ll say number of items to display one and we’ll pretend that it’s this featured section and then you can add a filter up here like you can add filters or you can add a sort so field you can choose view count and we’ll say the highest view count gets shown here so if i now do the
same thing i’m going to reconnect to data except this time it connects to data set post data set 2 text connects to same thing and essentially all i did here guys and i’m just going to connect it to literally the same exact thing except the different data set is that i added an additional data set so that way what gets shown up here on the featured isn’t shown the same way down below uh if that makes sense and then link connects to post page url
and then we’re just gonna do it with the button just so you guys have an understanding of how this works and you can see now why understanding how this works allows you to really have complete design customization because all it really comes down to is making sure you have a data set and that you connect all the elements on your page to the respective fields in the database to pull the dynamic data so now if we do the same thing we press save and
then we press preview you’ll notice well we’ll see whatever one’s the most viewed bingo i just viewed this one so it shows this is the most viewed blog post and it filtered it based off of that and you’ll see now down here it shows the newest blog post to the oldest and that’s how that works guys if this video helped you out and you want to learn more about kind of creating these custom blogs because there’s a lot more detail i could go into we
could talk about blog pages stuff like that please drop a like down below and comment comment and let me know one if you enjoyed the video too if you want to see more any questions you have and comments help the video and they help the channel so they’re much appreciated lastly don’t forget to smash that subscribe button turn those bell notifications on and you’ll instantly plug into the largest wix training community on the internet it’s a
fantastic place to be i would love to have you and collectively as a community we would love to have you involved we only continue to grow thanks to you and i appreciate that i look forward to seeing you on our next video and don’t forget to go click the card above or the link in the description below to access wixxtrainingacademy.com join the academy and get instant access to a bunch of free wix training content thank you guys for watching
today’s video i’ll catch you on our next one