Set Up Blogs

1Create a new blog or edit an existing one

Go to Settings › Tools › Content › Blog and select your existing blog or create a new one:

Learn how to Create a multi-language blog in HubSpot.

2Select blog templates

Under the Templates tab select the blog templates from your child theme.

Blog post

On the Blog Post Template, click Actions › Change template and select the template named Blog post.

Blog listing

On the Blog Listing Page, click Actions › Change template or just click Edit page. It will redirect you to the page editor, where you need to select the template named Blog listing.

If you are already in the listing page editor you can change the template from the top menu: Settings › Template and then click Use different template and select the template named Blog listing from your child theme.

You need to publish or update your page to apply the changes to your live blog.

3Set up subscriptions

You can enable blog subscriber notification emails from the Subscriptions tab:

Learn how to Set up blog subscription emails in HubSpot.

Once enabled, HubSpot automatically creates a subscription form for your blog, which is displayed according to your Blog configuration.

Each blog has its own subscription form, which you can find in Marketing › Forms using this naming format:

Subscribe to YOUR-BLOG-NAME Notifications YOUR-BLOG-ID (Language)

For example:

Learn how to Edit your blog subscription form in HubSpot.

4Change date formats

You can set your own date format in the Date Formats tab:

This is the format used in our previews:

MMM d, yyyy

MMM d, yyyy

5Disable or enable comments

You can disable or enable comments in the Comments tab:

Learn how to Set up and moderate your blog comments and how to Edit blog comment forms in HubSpot.

6Disable built-in social sharing

Act3's blog templates include their own social sharing widget, and you may also choose to use a third-party widget. For this reason, we recommend disabling HubSpot’s default blog social sharing options.

Even if HubSpot’s social sharing is not visible on the templates, its scripts are still loaded on the page, which can significantly slow down performance. That’s why we recommend turning them off:

You can find Act3’s built-in Sharing widget options in the Blog configuration module.

7Blog configuration and text labels

You can access the Blog configuration module while editing your blog listing page. To edit your listing page go to your blog homepage and select Edit Page from the HubSpot menu:

You can also edit the page from your HubSpot Settings › Tools › Content › Blog, under the Templates tab:

Once in the blog listing page editor, open the Contents sidebar on the left and click the Blog configuration module at the top:

In this module, you’ll find all the options that apply to the current blog, organized by sections and elements. At the bottom, you’ll also find all Text labels that can be edited or translated.

Even though you are editing the listing page, some settings are designed to apply to the post template as well, so be sure to check a post page after updating the listing page.

Some settings include helpful hints. After saving a major change (for example, selecting a different Hero), you usually need to reload the browser window for the editor to update.

When your configuration is ready, update the blog listing page to apply the changes.

Posts are not updating with the new settings?

These changes may not appear immediately on all your blog posts due to HubSpot’s cache. To speed up cache clearing, you can make a small update to the blog post header HTML.

Add an HTML comment in Settings › Content › Blog › [Your blog] › Templates › Blog post header HTML, for example:

<!-- Edit 12 -->

<!-- Edit 12 -->

Increment that number whenever you update the Blog configuration and republish your listing page. Changes may still take a few minutes to appear. Here’s a quick video showing how to do this: Watch on YouTube

You can also bypass the cache for yourself (visitors will still see the cached version until it clears) by opening a post and appending the following to the URL:

?hsDebug=true&test=7

?hsDebug=true&test=7

For example:

https://demo.neambo.com/act3/blog-3/17-tips-for-creating-an-awesome-brand?hsDebug=true&test=7

https://demo.neambo.com/act3/blog-3/17-tips-for-creating-an-awesome-brand?hsDebug=true&test=7

Increment the number whenever you make changes to preview them. Updates may still take a few seconds to appear.

Global sidebar

Using the Blog configuration described above, you can define a global sidebar for your blog that appears on the Listing 4 layout and on all post pages. By default, it uses the global partial /partials/blog-sidebar.html from the theme folder.

If you’re using a child theme, you can clone and rename this file in the Design Manager (right-click the file in the parent theme, then choose Clone to child theme). You can then reference your cloned file by name in Blog configuration › Sidebar settings.

You can edit the content of the global sidebar by opening your blog homepage or any blog post and clicking the sidebar to open it in the global content editor. This allows you to see the sidebar in its actual position on the page.

Alternatively, you can edit it from the Design Manager using the Open in global content editor button at the top of the code editor. This opens a standalone, unstyled version of the sidebar.

Any changes you make apply everywhere this global sidebar is used, just like global headers and footers.

8Related posts

In Version 31, we introduced two text fields that can be edited at the post level from the Contents sidebar. These allow you to specify tags or post IDs for the related_blog_posts tag.

When using these fields, separate multiple tags or IDs with a comma.

In most cases, we don’t recommend using these fields. However, if you want to try them, we recommend reading the details on how this HubL tag works in HubSpot’s documentation.