Adding a Blog to MagentoGo

Share

9th January 2012

Adding a Blog to MagentoGo

Following on from our last post about Twitter and MagentoGo I thought it might be helpful to write about  how to add a blog to MagentoGo, the SaaS e-commerce platform from Magento.

Firstly I should say that there is no inbuilt blog in Magento Go. It just doesn't exist. So we have to find a workaround to simulate one.

This is a bit fiddly as the key part of a blog (apart from being able to regularly publish content) is that it should be available as an RSS feed.

Secondly you can't set up an RSS feed on Magento Go. So again we need to find a workaround.

The approach we took to creating a blog on www.mothprevention.com was to create a series of pages with a particular URL format (which you can set in Magento Go). We then created a php script to read the whole sitemap that MagentoGo creates for Google. The script then unpacked the relevant pages that had the special URL format and converted them into the RSS feed.

As we couldn't host this PHP script on Magento Go's platform, we put it onto another of our site's webspace. While the URL of the rss feed is not the same as the Magento site, the URLs and internal references on the RSS feed ARE all correctly labelled and refer to the Magento site, creating a virtually seamless integration...

The resulting RSS feed is what we feed to Twitter.

If you'd like us to help you set up RSS on Magento Go, or set up a blog on Magento Go then please call 01300 320076 or email jon@alacrify.co.uk

Other News