New Feature: Custom Side Blocks

Monday 5/10/10 time 8:29 AM - Sjoerd @Moogo

A while ago one of our users, Amy of Championship Training, asked in the comments on one of our blogposts how she could add custom side blocks to her website. She had seen this at the Moogo website of http://www.hamibhutani.org/. (see screenshot below).

It turned out it was some very creative coding from the HamiBhutani webmaster, and it was not very easy to get this done for the non-technical user, because it needed some HTML/CSS coding to get it done.

However, since then several users have requested that feature, so we put our favourite geeks to work to come up with an easy way to get this feature available for all users. And now it is available for everyone, no coding needed!

You can use it for text, but you can also put in music players, videoplayers, and other widgets. For example, for Moogo we use it for our Twitter feed!

Here is how you get it:

- after you have logged in to your Moogo account, click on Site Management and then click on "Page Layout and Structure".

- then choose "Empty Content Block" from the drop-down menu and click "Add block".

- Drag the block to where you want it to appear, and click "Save changes". It will now appear on your website, but there is no content yet.

- To add content choose "Content Editting" from the tab menu (upper left corner). This will take you to the default content editor.

- Move your mouse over the empty content block and click on the lightning bolt icon that appears .

You can now edit the title and the content of the block.

As said before, you can add anything in the content of the block: text and javascript. You can for example add the script for a music player, your twitter feed or a weather forecast. Click "Save" and you are done!

You can add as many emptly blocks as you want, but as with everything in webdesign, don't overdo it.

If you have any more questions or ideas for other features, don't hesitate to drop them in the comments! As you can see, we really do listen to the requests of our users!