Add Blog posts to your Next.js application

Learn how to add blog posts in your MakerKit application

We can add your website's blog posts within the _posts folder.

Collections

Before writing a blog post, we have to define the post's collection. We use collections to organize our blog posts by their category.

For example, your blog could have collections such as changelog, announcements, tutorials, etc.

MakerKit generates every collection with its page, listing all the articles associated with it.

To change a collection page, please change the file src/pages/blog/[collection].ts.

Adding collections

Let's see how we can define a collection in Typescript:

interface Collection {
  name: string;
  // image
  logo?: string;
  emoji?: string;
}

As you can see, the only required property to create a collection is a name. You can also attach an image or a simple emoji for each collection.

A collection can be simply the following file:

{
  "name":"Changelog"
}

Writing a Blog Post

The interface of a blog post is the following:

interface Post {
  title: string;
  excerpt: string;
  date: string;
  live: boolean;
  tags?: string[];
  coverImage?: string;
  ogImage?: {
    url: string;
  };
  author?: {
    name: string;
    picture: string;
    url: string;
  };
  canonical?: string;
}

These values can be defined in MDX files using the frontmatter, for example:

---
title: An Awesome Post title
except: "Write here a short description for your blog post"
collection: changelog.json
date: '2022-01-05'
live: true
coverImage: '/assets/images/posts/announcement.webp'
tags:
  - changelog
  - coolstuff
---

Title

The property title is the title of the blog post.

NB: it does not correspond to the URL. The URL segment, instead, is defined by the name of the file.

Excerpt

Write a short description for your blog post. This description will also populate the relative meta tags.

Collection

The property collection is the path to the collection associated with the blog post.

NB: the .json extension needs to be part of the name.

Live

You can choose to publish or not a blog post by setting this property to false.

Cover Image

The property coverImage is the path to the post's image.