Blog posts

The blog is one of the two data-driven content types in the Website Builder (the other is sermons). Each post lives under Website Builder → Content → Blog, gets its own URL at /blog/{slug}, and surfaces in the Blog feed block on whatever pages you put it.

Posts are the right tool for things you'd write about: a recap of last weekend's retreat, an announcement of a new ministry, the pastor's thoughts on a passage, a profile of a long-time member. Anything more like a service replay belongs in sermons instead.

Create a post

From Website Builder → Content → Blog, click + New post in the top right. The editor opens with empty fields and the cursor in the title.

Title

The headline. Used in the post list, in the URL slug (auto-generated from the title), in the browser tab, and as the default SEO title. Write something a person would actually click — "Five things we learned at youth camp" not "Camp 2025 Recap."

Slug

The URL segment. Auto-generated from the title — "Five things we learned at youth camp" becomes five-things-we-learned-at-youth-camp. You can override it. Same rules as page slugs: lowercase, letters / digits / hyphens, no leading slash.

WARNING

Once a post is published and shared on social, changing the slug breaks the share links. If you do need to rename a URL, leave the old slug as-is and write a fresh post.

Body

A TipTap rich-text editor. Headings, lists, bold, italic, links, blockquotes, inline images, embedded videos. Drag-and-drop image uploads land in your storage bucket automatically. Paste a YouTube URL on its own line and it expands into an embed.

The body is the article itself. There's no separate "excerpt" field today — the post list and Blog feed block show the first paragraph or so as a preview.

Cover image

A single hero image at the top of the post and the thumbnail in the Blog feed grid. Upload via the Upload image button, or paste a URL if you've already got the image hosted somewhere. 1200×630 is a good size — that's the dimension social platforms expect for Open Graph share previews.

Author

Free-text field. Most teams put the pastor's name on every post; some rotate between team members. There's no member-picker today (it's not tied to your member records), just type the name.

Tags

Comma-separated. Used for two things:

• Filtering in the Blog feed block — you can configure a feed to show only posts tagged youth or missions, which lets you stick a curated feed on a sub-page (e.g., a Youth landing page).
• Search and discovery on the blog index. Visitors clicking a tag see all posts with that tag.

There's no formal "categories" taxonomy separate from tags — tags do the job of both. Stick with a small set of consistent tags rather than freestyling new ones on every post.

Published / Draft

Each post has its own publish flag. New posts default to draft — invisible to visitors, visible to admins at the direct URL for preview. Tick Published when it's ready.

The Blog feed block only shows published posts. Drafts never appear in feeds.

Published date

When you flip a draft to published, GCM stamps the publish date as "now" automatically. You can override the timestamp to back-date (writing a post about an event from last week) or future-date (scheduling Sunday's reflection to drop at 9 AM). See Publishing + drafts for how scheduling interacts with the rest of the system.

Edit or delete

Click any post row in the list to reopen it. Title, slug, body, all editable. Save publishes the change — there's no separate publish step on edits to an already-published post.

Deleting (trash icon on the row) soft-deletes the post. It disappears from the index and the public site within seconds. Soft-deleted posts can be restored from the recycle bin within 30 days. After 30 days they're permanently removed.

Surfacing posts on the site

A post on its own at /blog/{slug} is reachable but not discovered. To get people there:

• Add a Blog feed block to your homepage or a dedicated blog page. The feed lists all published posts with filters and pagination. See Blocks catalog.
• Add a link to /blog in your navigation menu using the Special page link type.
• Share specific posts on social media — each post has its own URL, Open Graph image (your cover), and meta description (derived from the first paragraph unless you set one explicitly in SEO).

The Blog feed block has three layouts — Grid, Magazine, List. Grid is the safest default; Magazine highlights a featured post; List works well on narrow sidebars or content-dense pages.

SEO

Each post inherits the global site SEO defaults (title pattern, description, social image) but can override them per-post in the SEO accordion of the post editor. Set a custom meta description for posts you expect to drive search traffic — Google sometimes shows it under the title in results.

Categories vs tags — why no category field?

Most CMSs have separate "categories" (one per post, hierarchical) and "tags" (many per post, flat). GCM intentionally only has tags. Reason: a church blog rarely has a tidy hierarchy, and the difference confuses non-technical authors. If you want the equivalent of categories, pick three to five tags and use them consistently — they'll behave just like categories on the public site.

See also: Sermon publishing, Publishing + drafts, Blocks catalog.