Write and publish a blog post

This guide shows you how to write a blog post — with a title, body, tags, and a category — and then publish it right away or schedule it for later. It’s how you announce updates to your members without a separate tool.

Who can do this: Admins with the blog editing permission (website:edit-blog). Publishing also needs the website:publish permission. If you don’t have these, the buttons below won’t appear.

Before you start

Decide what you want to share — an update, an event recap, or news.
You don’t need everything ready at once. You can save a draft and finish later.
If you want to file the post under a category, set your categories up first. See Organize blog posts with categories.

Steps

In the left sidebar, select Website, then Blog.
Select New post. The blog editor opens.
Type a Title for your post.
Write your post in the Body box below the title.
To add a tag, type a word that describes the post in Add a tag and press Enter (or type a comma). Repeat for each tag. Tags help readers find related posts.
To file the post, choose a Category from the list. Leave it as Uncategorized if you’re not sure.
Decide who can read the post. Posts are public by default. To limit it to members, see Make a blog post members-only.
When you’re ready to go live, select Publish. Your post appears on your public blog right away.

A formatting toolbar, a preview, and a featured image aren’t available yet in the blog editor.

Schedule a post to publish later

Instead of publishing now, you can pick a future time:

In the editor, select More actions, then Schedule for later.
Set a future date and time in Publish at.
Select Schedule.

Your post stays hidden until that time, then goes live on its own. Until then it shows a Scheduled label in your blog list, so you always know it’s on the way.

Save a draft instead

If you’re not ready to publish, select Save draft. Your post is saved privately and doesn’t appear on the public blog. Open it again any time from your blog list to keep working.

Take a post off the blog

To remove a published or scheduled post from your public blog, open it and select Unpublish. It goes back to a draft and your writing is kept, so you can publish it again later.

Verify

You’ll know it worked when your post shows a Published badge in the list at Website › Blog, and it appears on your public blog at /blog. A scheduled post shows a Scheduled badge with its publish date until the time arrives.

If something goes wrong

The New post button isn’t there — you don’t have the blog editing permission. Ask an admin to grant it.
Publish showed an error and nothing changed — someone may have already published this post in another tab. MapleGather never overwrites their change. Reload the post to see its current state, then try again.
You can’t save or publish — a post needs a title first. Add a title, then try again.
A message says the web address is already used — another post already uses this address (its slug). Edit the post’s web address to something unique, then save again.
The editor is read-only — you can view the post but not change it, which means you don’t have the blog editing permission.