Santa Clara University

Blog Feature

This element would be used as a companion to a Commonspot blog element. With this element, you can display one or more featured items on your home page, or any other page in your Commonspot site. The element will display the featured items' title and description, and provide a link to the page that includes the full blog. Optionally, you can include the titles of one or more recent, but not "featured" items in your blog.

The blog feature on this page provides an example. If no items in the blog were set to be "featured", the element will display the most recently posted blog item.

Custom Settings

The only required parameter for this element is a blog channel id. When you add the element to your page, you'll see a list of the available Commonspot blogs and their corresponding channel ids.

Example:

 channel_id=21 

Display Options

Instead of featuring the most recent post, or items set as featured in the full blog, you can set this element to randomly select an item from the blog and display it as featured. You can also modify the background color of the element. And by default the element will display two recent posts. If you want to change this to show more or less, supply a number in the "recent_posts" parameter. If you set this to zero, the Recent Posts heading and list will not appear.  You may also choose to display the featured blog posts in a list, instead of the default featured view.

Examples:

style=red (options are: red, gold, and beige - default is beige)
recent_posts=3 (default is "2")
random=true (default is "false")

This would randomly select a featured item from all blog posts, set the background color of the Web Publishing blog (channel_id 21) feature element to "red", and increase the number of recent posts to three.

display=list