Since the first public versions of the Fontis Blog extension for Magento, we've added a number of important new features culminating in this major version release. It also utilises the recently released Router extension.
The biggest change in version 2 is the addition of support for multiple blogs per store. We realised that the "blog" style of releasing content made sense in many contexts, not just for a typical news feed of posts. Content series such as how to articles, product reviews, press highlights etc. may be better off as separate blogs rather than being combined into a "one-size-fits-all" news feed, where categories or tags within a single blog was previously the only option available. To accommodate this, you can now have as many blogs as necessary, available at whatever URLs are desired.
Other highlights of this release include:
- Tags and authors
- Integration with our Algolia extension
- Microdata support
- AddThis integration
- Admin panel updates to accomodate various SUPEE security patches
With the move to multiple blogs per store, each blog has its own set of options. This is an important change from the first version, and means that the settings in system configuration for the blog are now just defaults.
Another point to note is that authors are now a separate entity within the blog. This helps ensure consistency of author details across different blogs and posts, as well as allowing us to create frontend pages that make it easy to view all posts attributed to a specific author:
Note that this needs to be turned on manually, either in the settings for a specific blog or in the system configuration as a default for all blogs.
As with any changes, we strongly suggest that you test the upgrade on a staging server and make a backup before attempting to update your live site. The process of migrating your blog data to the new format in version 2 isn't trivial, and any modified or overridden files will need to be updated to accommodate the changes.
The new version is available for download on our website, and you can browse the source on GitHub where we would welcome any contributions from the community.
We'd also love to hear about some of the new ways you make use of the support for multiple blogs per store, so let us know if this was just the feature you were waiting for.