How to expand SharePoint 2013 blog template

How to expand SharePoint 2013 blog template

Standart SharePoint 2013 blog template contains App Web parts called Categories, Comments, Posts and so on.

But  if you want to show blog authors in a separete web part (the same as Categories looks like) to let end user to click on the author name to see his posts, you won’t find any app parts or web part to to that.

First solution might be, you first sugestion in your mind,  is to develop own web part. But this approach could be time consuming, even if this task doesn’t seem so complex. I will show you how to develop app web par tin other posts. Now we will use SharePoint Designer 2013 and Links OOTB app.

1.  Open site you want to add blog authors web par tin SP Designer.
2. Find Categories list and Category.aspx page
   
3. Copy Category.aspx under Post list, as it shown in picture below
4. Rename just copied page as you wish, inmy case I Renamed it to PostByauthor.apsx 
5. Open the page and click edit in Advance Mode. 
6. Replace string CategoryId with AuthorId
7. Find and replace string PostCategory with Author.
8. Save the PostByauthor.apsx.
9. Right Click on PostByauthor.apsx and select “Properties”
10. Copy path to the page and open it in browser
11. You can get an error that some web part cannot be rendred, just remove broken web part and add a new one.  (Blog tools) 
12.  Now go to you blog main page and add Links app to the site
13. Find user ID you want to add as an blog author (in my case it was 15)
14. Add new item into Link list with url http:/hostweburl /sites/example/alexblog/Lists/Posts/PostsByAuthor.aspx?AuthorId=15
15. Add user name in description.
16. Add more links to the link list as much as you need, depends on blog author count. Don’t forget to change AuthorId of the end user . 
17.   Place link web part on the page

Somebody can say that it is not convinent way to add blog authors manualy. Yes, it is, but I can argue if you don’t have a lot of authors in the blog, for example more then 20, and you know there won’t be more this approach can work.

Next time I will show you how to create your own blog authors SharePoint 2013 app

Link to next post
http://sharepointandaspnet.blogspot.com/2014/10/sharepoint-2013-blog-template-custom.html

See you,

Have a good day! J