Solution to creating a blog like section on website

[atp123]

Hi,

I've recently taken over the administration and SEO of my companies website. I am looking to impliment a blog like section as we currently have 15ish good articles on products and services and it gives me an area of the site I can use to attract and trade links to and from. However the site currently has no blog plug-in or extension and im looking for solutions.

Ive done some research and there are plenty of good extentions, however. The site itself was built serveral years ago and is using an old Magento veriosn "Magento ver. 1.3.2.4". As such the magento connect doesnt work and im guessing compatability with the latest extensions is tenuous at best.

After looking into upgrading the magento version, with all the database management and debugging the theme, this is to large scale for me to undertake alone and risk bringing down the website. Likewise, this is a small company and the site does everything it "needs" to so they wouldnt pay the original design company to undertake this work. In short, it doesn't look likely that a blog via an extension will be happening anytime soon.

So im looking for any other ideas to mimicking a blog like section on the website. My original thaught is to simply create a "blog page" using the basic magento CMS and simply add each new post /article as a new page and code in the article snippet by hand into the blog page. Any thaughts?

 

[Conor_Tomkins · Accepted solution]

I've acheived a blog section by using a modified category list & product list template, creating a category for each blog post.

Use the description field as the actual article content. (See link this was the final result.)

https://www.redbrickworkwear.co.uk/help-advice

From an SEO point of view, this is no different from any other blog as long as your template is clean.

But if you require much more functionality such as post filtering/comments etc, I would suggest running an install of WordPress on the same server, then use Fishpig WordPress integration. The extension is up to date, works brilliantly and clean. (See link)

http://fishpig.co.uk/magento/wordpress-integration/

[markdh1]

atp123, I'm not advising you how to manage your business but I would highly encourage you to inform the client that a Maagento update is necessary. If you can't do a complex Magento upgrade yourself you should find a developer for them who can or recomend they do so.

There a many security vuneralbilities that have been addressed in the updates that the site is missing out on, not to mention better functionality. SEO or a blog implimentation is not doing the site any value. Get it updated asap.

[KentChr_DK]

Replys missing - anyone experencing this ?

I replied to this tread yesterday, and was announced today that markdh1 has posted a reply (my settings is that I subscribe to treads I participate in) ?

This is the second time within one week my replys is missing ...hmmm

[carlosrob4]

Why dont you for go a blog extension? There are many third party extension which create blog in Magento and offers some advance features to let you optimize the blog for Google.

Here is a one Blog Extension For Magento with some advance SEO features

[atp123]

Thanks for all the solutions,

Conor that solution is probably most suited as I do not require all the features of a blog some some basic functions that a category page should do with a bit of termplate editing.

My employer will be reluctant to spend on a blog extension. Esp if we have to pay the developers to update magento beforehand.

Thanks for the answers!