Build a blog

Aglyn's blog is built on collections — a collection holds your entries, and its pages are first-class designed pages: the list at /{collection} and each entry at /{collection}/{entry} render through your site's theme and shared layout, and can be fully designed in the besigner via template screens.

The Content page in the Aglyn console, showing a Blog collection with its published entries

Plan availability

Free to start; content features scale with your tier.

1. Create a collection

In Content, create a collection for your posts. Manage entries from the console.

Delete a collection

Delete collection sits in the Collections & Entries toolbar, beside Categories and New entry, and acts on the collection currently picked in the Collection dropdown. It is a site admin action: if your role on this site is editor or viewer the button is not there at all, and an org role on its own does not grant it — the check reads your role on this site. Ask a site admin, or have one raise your role in Members.

Aglyn refuses the delete while anything still depends on the collection, and the dialog tells you which of these it is before you can type anything:

A template screen still points at it. The message names the screen and which picker holds it — "Blog" is still the source for "Blog index" (list template). Set that collection's List template screen or Entry template screen back to the built-in option first. Deleting it while a published page renders from it would leave that page with nothing to draw.
It still has entries. The message gives the count — "Blog" still has 12 entries. Delete them from the entries table first, one at a time; deleting a collection never removes published entries for you.

Once nothing depends on it, type the collection's display name exactly — the name, not the slug, and capitalisation counts — and confirm. Deleting removes the collection, its category list, and its template pointers. Your screens are not deleted (they keep their design and simply stop being template screens) and nothing in the media library is touched. The /{collection} and /{collection}/{entry} routes stop resolving on the live site within about a minute; there is no publish step.

No undo

There is no trash and no restore. A deleted collection comes back only from your own export. Export anything you may want before you confirm.

2. Write entries

Add rich blog entries with images, a live preview, and scheduling so posts publish at the right time.

Each entry carries, besides the title, excerpt, cover image, and markdown body:

Category — a single bucket (e.g. Guides) used for filtering and related posts, picked from the collection's category list (see below), never typed free-form.
Tags — comma-separated labels (e.g. nextjs, seo).
Author — the entry's byline: an author record from the Authors tab, a one-off custom byline, or the site's own publisher entity when both are blank. See Authors.
SEO title / SEO description — search & social overrides; they fall back to the title and excerpt when blank.

Scheduling

Each entry row has a Schedule button. Pick a Publish at time (the past is refused) and confirm — the entry's status chip reads scheduled with the local time, and "the entry goes live once the time passes (applied on the next site refresh)", exactly as the dialog says: no manual step, and its status flips to published on its own. A scheduled entry joins the sitemap and RSS feed at the same moment. Publish/Unpublish on the row toggle an entry immediately, and View opens the live URL once it's published.

Authors

Content is often published under a byline that is not the account that wrote it — a pen name, a guest contributor, or the company itself. So an author is its own record rather than a user: open the Authors tab on the Content page to create them, and pick one per entry.

Each author is either a Person or an Organization, and the choice is a real one — they are different schema.org types with different fields, so the editor shows only the fields that apply:

Field	Person	Organization
Name	required	required
URL	author page or personal site	site
Portrait / Logo	published as `image`	published as `logo`
Job title	yes	—
Works for	yes	—
Profile links	`sameAs`, one URL per line	`sameAs`, one URL per line
Bio	shown beside the byline; not structured data	same

The portrait is a media-picker target — choose from the site or organization library, or paste a URL if the avatar lives elsewhere.

An author flows straight into the entry page's structured data: the Article's author becomes that Person or Organization, with its url, image, job title and profile links, while publisher stays the site entity you set in Setup → SEO → Entity — who wrote the piece and who put it out are different claims. The byline also fills the Entry Meta block and the {{entry.author}} token wherever they appear.

Entries reference an author by a stable id, so renaming an author updates every post at render time, exactly like categories. Deleting an author leaves its entries with the byline as plain text — they keep rendering, they just lose the link, portrait and profile links in their structured data. Posts written before authors existed keep their typed byline and are published as a Person with that name, as they always were.

A site holds up to 200 authors.

Visual editor

The body opens in a Visual tab — a WYSIWYG surface where you edit the formatted article directly. It is native to the markdown dialect: what you type round-trips losslessly to the same markdown string the site stores and renders, so nothing is ever saved as HTML. A Markdown tab sits beside it with the raw source and a live preview pane (rendered with the exact same parser the published site uses); both tabs edit the same content, so you can switch freely.

The shared toolbar works in both tabs:

B / I — bold or italicize the selection (Cmd/Ctrl+B, Cmd/Ctrl+I in Visual).
H2 — toggle the current line between paragraph and heading.
Link — wrap the selection as a link; you're prompted for an https:// URL or a site path like /pricing. In Visual mode, clicking an existing link opens a small popover to edit or remove it (it never navigates).
Image — insert an image by URL, or hit Choose from media in the same dialog to pick one from your media library; the standalone Insert image button opens the media picker directly.

Visual-mode shortcuts: type # , ## , ### , - , or 1. at the start of a line to convert it to a heading or list item; Enter splits a block (and exits a list from an empty item); Backspace at a line start demotes headings/list items and then merges paragraphs; Cmd/Ctrl+Z / Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+Z undo and redo. Pasting rich text (from a web page, Google Docs, etc.) keeps everything the markdown dialect can express — bold, italic, links, headings, lists, and images — and flattens the rest to plain text.

Markdown supports **bold**, *italic*, ## headings, - lists, 1. numbered lists, [links](https://…) — including site-relative links ([pricing](/pricing)) that get client-side navigation — and ![images](https://…).

There are two heading sizes. Any # run is read as a heading and clamped onto them: # becomes the larger one and #### or deeper become the smaller one, so a document pasted from elsewhere keeps its structure instead of leaving a literal # in the text.

3. Design the pages with template screens

Each collection has two template pickers in Content:

List template screen — renders /{collection}. Drop the Collection Entries block on it: its children repeat once per published entry, with {{entry.*}} tokens substituted per entry. The default card ships title, date, excerpt, and a Read more link, so dropping it in works instantly.
Entry template screen — renders /{collection}/{entry}. Use {{entry.*}} bindings and the Entry Body block, which renders the entry's markdown as themed headings, paragraphs, lists, links, and images.

Template screens go through the normal published pipeline — site theme, shared layout, reusable components, variables — exactly like any other screen (the same mechanism as commerce product/collection templates).

Blog blocks

Besides Collection Entries and Entry Body, three entry-page blocks are available in the block library:

Entry Meta — an author · date · category line plus tag chips, with an optional round avatar in front of it. On an entry template it fills itself in from the entry being rendered, so drop it on and it works; each part can be hidden with its Show switch. Typing into Author / Date / Category / Tags overrides what it would have shown — including the {{entry.author}} / {{entry.date}} / {{entry.category}} / {{entry.tags}} bindings, which still work and are still what the block's preset seeds. Date format picks how the published date reads — Site default (8/9/2026), Month and year (Aug 2026), Short date, Long date or ISO. It applies to the date the block fills in for itself; a date you typed in by hand is left exactly as typed. Avatar takes any image from the media library (usually your brand mark) and renders it 36px and round; blank shows no avatar. The avatar is chosen on the block, not per author — entries carry an author name, not a portrait.
Related Posts — other entries of the same collection that share the current entry's category or a tag, newest first. Attributes: Heading (default "Related articles"), Limit (default 3), Layout, Columns and Show cover. Layout List — the default — is a plain list of links with a date · category line under each. Layout Card grid lays the posts out in Columns cards per row (default 3), each with a category chip above its title. Show cover adds each post's cover image; posts without one show their title alone rather than an empty box. Renders nothing when the entry has no category/tags or nothing matches.
Share Bar — X, LinkedIn, Facebook, and copy-link buttons for the current page URL. Attribute: Heading (default "Share").
Category Pills — the collection's categories as a row of links: All plus one pill per category. Drop it on the list template screen, above the Collection Entries block. Attributes: Collection slug (blank = the collection from the URL) and All label — the text of the unfiltered pill, default "All". Clear the All label box to drop that pill and leave only the category pills; the box then reads none, which is the value that actually persists — typing none yourself does the same thing. Renders nothing until the collection has categories.

Category filtering

Each pill is a real link to /{collection}/category/{category}, which renders the same list template with only that category's entries. Nothing to wire: the pills are built from the collection's categories and the current one is highlighted automatically.

Because the category is part of the path rather than a ?query=, each filtered listing is its own cacheable, linkable, indexable page — it can be shared, opened in a new tab, and crawled. All is the bare /{collection}, so the unfiltered listing never gains a second address.

A category with nothing published in it still renders — the page, the pills and the rest of your template, with zero entry rows — so a reader can pick another pill instead of hitting a 404. The built-in listing writes "Nothing published in Guides yet." in that gap; on your own list template nothing fills it, so add your own empty-state message under the Collection Entries block if you expect thin categories. A category segment that matches nothing at all renders the same empty listing and is marked noindex.

Pagination composes with the filter: page 2 of a category lives at /{collection}/category/{category}/page/2, and page counts describe the filtered set. Category listings join the sitemap automatically.

Pills address a category by its stable id, so renaming a category changes every pill's label without breaking the links between your own pages. A link someone else wrote by hand against the old name is the exception — the route also accepts a category's current name, so an outside link built that way stops matching after a rename and lands on the empty listing above. Prefer linking with the pills.

Entry tokens

Token	Value
`{{entry.title}}`	Entry title
`{{entry.excerpt}}`	Short summary
`{{entry.body}}`	Raw markdown source (use the Entry Body block to render it)
`{{entry.date}}`	Published date
`{{entry.slug}}`	Entry slug
`{{entry.url}}`	Entry route, e.g. `/blog/my-post`
`{{entry.coverImage}}`	Cover image URL
`{{entry.category}}`	Entry category
`{{entry.tags}}`	Comma-joined tags, e.g. `nextjs, seo`
`{{entry.seoTitle}}`	SEO title (falls back to the title)
`{{entry.seoDescription}}`	SEO description (falls back to the excerpt)
`{{collection.name}}` / `{{collection.slug}}`	The routed collection
`{{collection.category}}`	Name of the category the URL filtered on (empty when unfiltered)
`{{collection.categorySlug}}`	That category's URL segment (empty when unfiltered)
`{{pagination.page}}` / `{{pagination.totalPages}}`	Which page this URL shows, and how many there are
`{{pagination.prevUrl}}`	Link to the previous page (empty on the first page)
`{{pagination.nextUrl}}`	Link to the next page (empty on the last page)

No template? Still designed

When no template screen is set, the built-in list and article render inside your site theme and default shared layout (the home screen's layout), so blog pages never look detached from the rest of the site. The built-in article includes the entry meta line under the title, the cover image, the body, related posts, and a share bar. The built-in list is paginated (see below).

Paginated page sets

Long collections split into pages. The built-in list shows a page of entries with ← Newer / Older → links; deeper pages live at /{collection}/page/2, /{collection}/page/3, and so on (page 1 is the bare /{collection}). A page past the end returns 404.

On your own list template screen, turn on pagination by setting the Collection Entries block's Entries per page attribute; it then renders the page from the URL (the Page attribute overrides it for a fixed page). Without Entries per page, the block shows the top Entries limit entries as before. The same applies inside a category: /{collection}/category/{category}/page/2.

One list template screen serves every one of those URLs, so a pager built from hardcoded links would read the same on all of them. Bind the {{pagination.*}} tokens instead: a Text block with Page {{pagination.page}} of {{pagination.totalPages}}, and two Link blocks whose URL is {{pagination.prevUrl}} and {{pagination.nextUrl}}.

Both URLs keep the category you are inside, so "next" never drops the reader back onto the unfiltered list. And both are empty where there is nowhere to go — no previous page, no {{pagination.prevUrl}} — which makes a link with no target render as inert text rather than a link to a page that doesn't exist. That is why you can bind them on every route without building a variant of the screen for each.

4. Publish & syndicate

Publish the collection. Blog pages join the site's sitemap automatically, and each entry's <head> uses its SEO title/description (falling back to title/excerpt) and its cover image as the social card.

Aglyn also generates an RSS feed per collection, at:

https://your-domain.com/<collection-slug>/rss.xml

e.g. https://acme.com/blog/rss.xml. This is the URL to link — it names no site, so it keeps working if you connect a custom domain later, and it is the one to put behind a "Subscribe" link.

The same feed answers on the explicit form, if you need to point at another site's:

https://your-domain.com/api/collections-rss?host=<your-site>&collection=<collection-slug>

host accepts your site's platform origin (acme.aglyn.app), your custom domain (acme.com), or the bare subdomain (acme), and collection is the collection's slug.

Items carry the entry's title, link, publish date, excerpt, and its category and tags as feed categories, newest first. Link it from your own footer or share it with aggregators. Feed readers also find it on their own: every collection page — the list, each paginated page, each category, and each entry — declares the feed in its page head, so pasting your blog's own address into a reader subscribes it to the feed.

Tips

Schedule entries ahead of time and let Aglyn publish them for you.
Pair the blog with the SEO toolkit — entries emit JSON-LD for rich results.

1. Create a collection​

Delete a collection​

2. Write entries​

Scheduling​

Authors​

Categories​

Visual editor​

3. Design the pages with template screens​

Blog blocks​

Category filtering​

Entry tokens​

No template? Still designed​

Paginated page sets​

Build your own pager​

4. Publish & syndicate​

Tips​

Related​