So much of the power of the web lies in the way it allows people to tell stories and communicate with audiences. A blog is one of the most flexible and powerful tools available to individuals and businesses to tell those stories.
Today, we are unveiling a new Blog API that will let you customize your Wix Blog with Velo, letting you express yourself in a way that is even more deeply inline with your own personal voice or that of your brand.
The Wix Blog is a robust platform that provides you with everything you need to share posts with your audience, manage the content of your blog, and understand how it is performing. The new API will let you take your blog even further, allowing you to customize several elements of your blog including:
Creating custom post pages
Designing your own blog feed
Making a trending now widget
Displaying related posts
Building a unique commenting widget
You can see many of these elements in action in this demo blog we created to highlight the new API. We have also used the Blog API extensively here on the Velo blog to deliver a unique experience for readers.
One set of elements that we’d like to highlight in particular are custom reactions which allow you to create a branded like button or other kinds of reactions. This simple element is a critical part of a blog and is one of the main ways users can provide instant feedback on your content.
If you scroll to the bottom of this post you will see a new custom Velo like button that we recently implemented. This Velo style heart is based on the basic grid that we use as a foundation for all of the icons and other visual elements on our site.
This is an example of how a relatively simple customization can help you tie your blog even more closely to your brand and deliver a more seamless experience for your readers.
To implement this on your own blog, you need to start with a design for your custom like button. You can keep things simple, with just two images to represent the unclicked and clicked states of the button. For our like button, we implemented a more robust solution with four states, including a hover state and a transition animation as well.
Here you can see the images we used in our like button:
You can refer to this code example for detailed information about implementing a custom reaction in your blog.
How will you customize your blog? Explore all the options available with the Blog API to bring custom experiences to your readers and don't forget to like this post to see our custom like button in action.
