iBlog for OpenCart - Revamped and Improved
iBlog brings a simple and straightforward way to blog in OpenCart. With this product, you can easily publish your posts without having to rely on third-party solutions, such as WordPress, and your customers will not leave your store.
We have listened to you, and we have completely reworked it. Now it works better, faster and it is a lot more feature-packed than before.
Here's the new stuff
iBlog now features a beautiful Bootstrap inspired dashboard where you can view the most popular posts and the most recent posts in your blog. It is fully customizable, easy to use and backed up by iSenselabs' support team.
The dashboard is something new, and you can see the most important and vital information for your posts from it - the recent ones and the most popular ones. You can also see the views of your posts. And this is just the beginning - in the next versions, we will also introduce filters and more statistics!
Let's check the categories:
There are improvements here as well. This is a multi-category implementation, which means that now you can have subcategories. In addition to that, you can have a different image and description for each category. Last but not least, you can set SEO URLs and sort order.
If you have to make small adjustments, such as changing the sort order or if you want to enable/disable the module, now you can do that directly from the listing.
Here is where we made the most changes:
The changes in the posts pages are a lot! For starters, the listing is rewritten, and it provides you a more natural way to search through the posts, to see the SEO URL and to publish/unpublish the given post without opening a whole new page. It gets exciting when you open a specific post:
Since the improvements here are a lot, we will list them one by one:
- Set a specific URL slug - If you wish not to do it, the system will generate it automatically.
- Author chooser - You can set a specific author to each post
- Category selector - Select one or more category to which this post will be associated.
- Related post logic - You can choose whether the system to automatically decide which posts should be shown as similar to this one or for you to select them manually. You can also altogether disable the related post panel for a specific post.
- Related product - If you want to promote a product, this is how you can do it. When you write an article about a specific product, add it to this field. It will be displayed right after the post ends.
- Publish/Unpublish date - From these two fields, you can set from which date to which date the given post to be visible. Even if you set it to be active, the post will not be displayed until the publish date is reached. Useful if you want to schedule posts.
If you think that this is all, then you are mistaken. Let's take a look at the settings panel:
Apart from the SEO options that you can see from the screenshot above, the new things here are the "Post Info Format" and "Listing Layout." They are self-explanatory - you can choose between three different listing layouts, and you can also change the post info format.
What you should also check are the options for the posts:
Worth noting here is that you can again change the post information. Also, you can choose if you want to display sharing options (via AddThis) or not.
The most important change here is that now you have a choice for a comment aggregator - you can choose between Disqus and Facebook comments.
That's enough on the admin panel. Here is how the front-store looks in the new iBlog:
Quite nice, right?
The featured posts are far more visible. Also, there is an RSS icon that gives you a feed link with the latest posts in the blog. What's more interesting is the right column of the page - there are five widgets there:
- Search
- Categories
- Post tabs
- Post tags
- Recent posts
You can reorder them in any way you want. You can also disable some of them. And last but not least you can show them not just on the iBlog page but on any page in your store!
The new iBlog is available for OpenCart 2 and OpenCart 3. It is also multi-lingual and multi-store compatible.
Conclusion
That wraps things up. We've worked hard on this, and we believe that you will enjoy the new stuff. Also, we are open to further improvements. If you have any additional questions or comments, please let us know in the comments section below.
