An ecommerce blog that lives in your shop

The blog keeps its posts in tables of its own, so it behaves like a blog rather than a set of loose pages: categories that nest, tags that count their posts, authors with a page each, a publish time to schedule by, and a count of views.

• Posts as drafts, scheduled for later, or published, with a cover picture, excerpt, featured flag and their own search title and description.
• Category, tag and author pages, a front page with its own title and description, and a search box.
• Reading time, share links, breadcrumbs, previous and next post, and related posts under each one.
• Related products you pick on each post, shown under the writing, so a post about brewing points at the kettle.

The blog's pages are drawn by your theme, and you choose what they show: posts per page, one to three per row, a sidebar with recent posts, categories and a tag cloud, the author and the date. The page editor also gains blog sections to place anywhere, such as the latest posts on your home page or a list of blog categories.

A theme can declare that it needs the blog, and installing that theme installs the plugin with it. More on that on themes.

• BlogPosting and breadcrumb structured data on every post, switchable in the settings.
• An RSS feed at feed.xml under the blog's address, with as many recent posts as you choose.
• A default share picture and text for posts that have none of their own.
• The blog's address is a setting. It starts at /blog and you can move it, for example to /journal or /news.

The dashboard has screens for posts, categories, tags and authors. You can also ask the assistant to write a post: it proposes it as a draft by default, with its categories, tags and web address, and nothing is published until you confirm. It can also list your posts by state, so asking what is scheduled for next week has an answer.

If your Magento 2 shop runs the Magefan blog, the migration connector reads its posts, nested categories, tags and related products, and brings them across when the Blog plugin is installed and on. A post that already exists by address is left alone, so a rerun adds what is new and touches nothing you edited. The rest of the move is on importing your catalogue and moving from Magento.