New CakesDecor Features #1: Blogs, Tutorials and Recipes

Woo hoo… it’s time to introduce another great new feature on our site. It all started when ButRCream posted a forum topic – Tips On Achieving Crisp Edges with Fondant? and Tortacouture added excellent tutorial as a comment. We realized that it’s really easy for a tutorial like this to get lost in all the forum topics and comments and it would be great to have a separate Tutorials section on the site. We finally decided to turn it into reality this week.

We are bringing you 3 brand new features – Blogs, Tutorials and Recipes.
However, Tutorials and Recipes are only a type of Blog entry, you can browse them separately by clicking on the Recipes or Tutorials buttons on the top of the website.

Adding a Blog, Tutorial or Recipe is really easy and you don’t need to spend hours adding it. You can find “ADD NEW” buttons on the left side of each respective page. On the Blogs page, there is a “ADD NEW BLOG ENTRY” button, On the Tutorials page, there is a “ADD NEW TUTORIAL” button and on the Recipes page, there is “ADD NEW RECIPE” button. There are also links to create new Blog, Tutorial or Recipe in the “My CakesDecor” dropdown navigation, located on the top right of the website (note that you must be signed in to see this link).

After clicking on the link, you’ll be redirected to the Add New Blog Entry page. All you have to do is to choose what do you want to create(Blog entry, Tutorial or Recipe), fill in the title and content. It’s up to you how you format the content – there are no special rules for this.

Everyone has her/his own Blog Page, where other members can find all her/his recent Blogs, Tutorials and Recipes.

If you want to get the latest Blog entries, Recipes or Tutorials, you can subscribe to our RSS feeds (the button is located on the respective page under the “ADD NEW” button)

The Recipes Forum will be removed, but don’t worry – all the recipes that were posted there, will be moved into the Cakes & Cake Decorating, Cupcakes, Cookies or Candies forum. Feel free to “repost” the recipes to the recipes section ;).

Blog Series
You have an option to create Series as well. They are great for grouping related entries together. You may consider using them in many scenarios like for grouping entries that track the progress of your next cake (e.g. “Wedding Cake” series) or for grouping your related tutorials (e.g. “Fondant Tutorials” series) etc.

Series keep your related entries interconnected thanks to the added navigation bar on the entry pages (you can find just under the heading and meta information bar). The navigation bar contains links to the previous and next part of the series as well as to the series index page. No worries, entries in the series are automatically kept in order for you – how cool.

There is also series listing on each blog page. This list contains only the series written by the respective blog author. Plus you can find the Top Series box on the Blogs page. It is easy to start using this feature. All of the series management is performed on the add/edit blog entry page. There is new ‘Series’ dropdown list just above the entry title field. It is used to start new series by selecting ’- start new series -’ and providing the title or to select one of the existing series. When you decide to write the next part of the existing series just choose it from the dropdown and the actual series title along with the new part number will be displayed above the entry title field.

All Series Listings
You can see all series on the blog series listing. And there is more… you can browse our wonderful world of blog series by the following sorting criteria:

• recently updated
• most entries
• most read
• most discussed

This means that each blog series has additional unique details: total number of reads and comments as well as recently updated info.

Note: Each tutorial has to be “complete” – meaning that the tutorial should be adequate instruction for someone to recreate your process from start to finish. You can add a link to the tutorial on your website, however, tutorials that contains just few steps and are linked to “the rest of the tutorial” will be removed.

Enjoy and stay tuned for related contest details.. coming tomorrow