Contents
- What Blogano does
- Installing
- Setting up your pages
- Shortcode reference
- Who can see what
- The submission workflow
- The Editorial Desk
- Pinning and featuring
- Categories and filtering
- Touring the settings
- Email and notifications
- Registration and verification
- Sharing and search engines
- Importing and exporting
- When something looks wrong
Blogano User Manual
A curated, member-driven feed for WordPress. Readers submit links, your editors approve them, and the whole thing renders on your own pages — no WordPress admin access required for anyone but you.
| Audience | Site owners and editors |
|---|---|
| Requires | WordPress 5.8+, PHP 7.4+ |
| Reading time | About 30 minutes |
About this version number. Blogano was numbered privately while it was being built, reaching 1.61.0 before release. That numbering was for development only. The first public version is 1.0.0, so if you followed development and expected a higher number, nothing is missing — it was simply renumbered for launch.
Section 01
What Blogano does
Blogano turns a WordPress site into a curated link feed that your members contribute to and your editors control.
A member pastes a URL into a form. Blogano fetches the page’s title, description and image automatically, shows them a preview, and files the result as a submission awaiting review. An editor approves it. It appears in the feed.
Everything happens on your own front-end pages. Members never see the WordPress dashboard, never need a WordPress login screen, and never touch wp-admin. That is the central design decision, and most of the plugin follows from it: there are front-end equivalents for registering, logging in, editing a profile, writing a submission and reviewing other people’s.
What it is not
- A comments system. Blogano is about links and short posts, not discussion threads.
- A membership or paywall plugin. It controls who can submit and publish, not who can read.
- A replacement for your theme. Blogano renders inside your pages and follows your theme’s width and typography.
The same feed, used several ways
One shortcode runs your main feed, and the same shortcode with a few options can also produce a features strip, a photo gallery or a row of logos elsewhere on your site. That is covered in Section 04 under Live Feed options, and it is worth knowing about early because it changes how you might plan your pages.
Section 02
Installing
- Check your server. Blogano needs WordPress 5.8 or newer and PHP 7.4 or newer. Most hosts today run PHP 8.x, which is fine. If you are unsure, look under Tools → Site Health → Info.
- Upload the plugin. In WordPress, go to Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin, choose the Blogano ZIP file, and install it.
- Activate. Activation adds a Blogano item to your admin menu. Nothing is visible on your public site yet — that comes next.
Other languages. Blogano’s interface text is translatable. Translation files go in the plugin’s own languages folder and are picked up automatically — no setting to switch on. This is separate from the right-to-left and main-language options under Layout, which control how your content is laid out rather than what language the buttons are in.
The Blogano menu appears after activation.
Section 03
Setting up your pages
Blogano works by placing shortcodes on ordinary WordPress pages. You create the pages, you put one shortcode on each, and then you tell Blogano which page is which so it can link them together.
That last step matters more than it sounds. Blogano needs to know where your Login page is so it can send logged-out visitors there; it needs to know where the submission form is so the “New Post” button goes somewhere. If you skip it, the plugin falls back to guessing, and the guesses are not always right.
The minimum viable setup
You do not need all nine pages to start. Four will give you a working site:
- Create a Live Feed page. Add a new WordPress page called something like “Feed” and put
[psw_live_feed]in it. This is your public front page for Blogano content. - Create a Login page. A page containing
[psw_login]. Members will be sent here whenever they need to sign in. - Create a New Post page. A page containing
[psw_submission_form]. This is the submission wizard where members paste a URL. - Create a My Posts page. A page containing
[psw_user_dashboard]. Members manage their own submissions here. - Tell Blogano where they are. Go to Blogano → Settings → Shortcodes and assign each page you created to its matching slot. Save.
Do not skip step 5. Assigning pages is what makes navigation work. Without it, buttons inside Blogano may link to the wrong place or fall back to your site’s home page. If something links somewhere unexpected later, this is the first place to check.
Every Blogano page assigned to its slot.
Adding the rest
Once the core four are working, add the remaining pages the same way: create a page, paste the shortcode, assign it under Shortcodes. Section 04 lists all nine.
Section 04
Shortcode reference
Nine shortcodes, grouped by who they are for. Most take no configuration — appearance and behaviour are controlled centrally under Blogano → Settings rather than page by page. The exception is [psw_live_feed], which accepts options so that one shortcode can also serve as a features strip, a gallery or a row of logos. Those are listed under Live Feed options at the end of this section.
Public pages
[psw_live_feed] Anyone
The main feed. Shows approved submissions as cards, newest first, with search and filtering built in. This is the page most visitors will see.
| Login | Not required |
|---|---|
| Typical page | Feed, News, Home |
[psw_login] Logged-out visitors
A front-end sign-in form, so members never see the standard WordPress login screen. Already-logged-in visitors are handled gracefully rather than shown an empty form.
| Login | Not required |
|---|---|
| Typical page | Login, Sign in |
[psw_register] Logged-out visitors
Front-end account creation. If email verification is switched on, new accounts stay unverified until the member clicks the link they are sent.
| Login | Not required |
|---|---|
| Typical page | Register, Join |
[psw_resend_verification] Anyone
A small page where someone who never received their verification email can request another. Only needed if you have email verification enabled.
| Login | Not required |
|---|---|
| Typical page | Resend verification |
[psw_user_directory] Anyone
A browsable list of contributors, with search. Each entry links through to that member’s public bio page.
| Login | Not required |
|---|---|
| Typical page | Contributors, Members |
Member pages
[psw_submission_form] Members
The submission wizard. A member pastes a URL, Blogano fetches the title, description and image from that page, and the member can adjust anything before submitting. The same page is reused for editing an existing submission.
| Login | Required |
|---|---|
| Needs | Permission to write posts |
| Typical page | New Post, Submit |
[psw_user_dashboard] Members
“My Posts” — where a member sees their own submissions, their status, and can edit, delete or pin them to their bio page.
| Login | Required |
|---|---|
| Needs | Permission to write posts |
| Typical page | My Posts, Dashboard |
[psw_user_profile] Any logged-in user
The member’s own profile editor: display name, avatar, bio and related details. This is also what powers their public bio page.
| Login | Required |
|---|---|
| Needs | Nothing beyond being signed in |
| Typical page | Profile, My Account |
Staff pages
[psw_admin_dashboard] Editors and above
The Editorial Desk. Every submission from every member, with approve, reject, edit and pin controls. This is the page your review team lives on.
| Login | Required |
|---|---|
| Needs | Permission to edit others’ posts |
| Typical page | Editorial Desk, Review |
Publish this page carefully. The Editorial Desk page is protected by permissions, so ordinary members who land on it see a message rather than the contents. Even so, there is no reason to put it in your public navigation menu. Give the URL to your editors directly.
Live Feed options
Add nothing and [psw_live_feed] behaves exactly as described above, following your settings. Add a few options and the same shortcode becomes a features strip, a photo gallery or a row of logos — several of them on one page if you want.
Every option you leave out keeps following your global settings, so it changes with them later. Only set what this instance genuinely needs to do differently.
Start here. If you are adding a second feed to a page that already has one, put static="1" on it. That single option is what stops your extra grids from changing when a visitor searches your main feed. The reason is under Several feeds on one page below.
What it shows
| Option | Values | What it does |
|---|---|---|
category | One or more names, comma separated | Locks this feed to those categories. category="News, Sports" shows posts in either. Spaces around commas are fine. A category set this way is part of what the feed is, so it is not shown as a removable chip, and it overrides anything a visitor filters. |
limit | A number | How many posts. This is the main thing that decides how heavy the page is, because each post means an image. |
show | Any of image, title, description, date, type, categories, publisher, avatar, link, share | What to keep on the card. Anything not listed is hidden, for this feed only. show="image" strips a card to its picture. Leave it out to follow your global settings. |
orderby | date, title, rand, menu_order | What to sort by. rand shuffles on every page load, which suits a features strip. |
order | asc, desc | Which direction. Newest first is the default. |
How it behaves
| Option | Values | What it does |
|---|---|---|
static | 1, 0 | Makes this feed ignore the page’s filters completely, so it never changes when a visitor searches. Put it on every feed that is not your main one. Search and pagination switch off with it, because both write to the filters a static feed is ignoring. |
search | 1, 0 | The search box and filter bar. Off automatically when static="1". |
pagination | 1, 0 | Page numbers underneath. Off automatically when static="1", and never shown when grid="0". |
cta | 1, 0 | The sign-up block shown to logged-out visitors. It loads a full-size image, so turn it off on decorative grids. |
featured | 1, 0 | The featured post across the top. Its appearance comes from Featured Post Style under Cards & Feed. |
grid | 1, 0 | The row of cards. grid="0" with featured="1" shows the featured post alone. |
nav | 1, 0 | The account bar Blogano adds to any page containing one of its shortcodes. See Hiding the account bar below — this one works per page, not per feed. |
How it looks
These set sizes for this feed only. Colours, fonts, borders and corner radius are deliberately not here — they stay global, so every feed still looks like the rest of your site. If you need one grid to look genuinely different, give it class and style that class yourself.
| Option | Values | What it does |
|---|---|---|
style | standard, overlay, full-image | Card style, the same three choices as the global setting. |
columns | A number | Cards per row on desktop. |
columns_mobile | A number | Cards per row on a phone. This is how you get two side by side on mobile — not by setting a width. |
width | e.g. 800px or 100% | How wide this feed is on desktop. On a phone every feed is full width, so there is no mobile equivalent. |
padding_mobile | A number, in pixels | How far in from the screen edge the feed sits on a phone. |
gap | A number, in pixels | Space between cards. |
gap_mobile | A number, in pixels | Space between cards on a phone. |
image_height | A number, in pixels | Height of the picture on each card. Ignored when square="1". |
square | 1, 0 | Square pictures, sized from the card width. |
class | One or more class names | Adds your own CSS class to this feed. |
Worked examples
Your main feed. No options at all.
[psw_live_feed]Three cards on a home page. A taste of the feed, linking through to the real thing.
[psw_live_feed limit="3" columns="3" static="1" cta="0" featured="0"]A features strip for one category. Four posts from Technology, shuffled so it changes on each visit.
[psw_live_feed category="Technology" limit="4" columns="4" orderby="rand" static="1" cta="0"]A gallery. Pictures only, square, five across, two across on a phone.
[psw_live_feed limit="10" columns="5" columns_mobile="2" show="image" square="1" static="1" cta="0"]One highlighted post. The featured post by itself, with no cards under it.
[psw_live_feed featured="1" grid="0" static="1" cta="0"]Several feeds on one page
You can put as many feeds on a page as you like, but only one of them can be the filterable one. When a visitor searches or picks a category, that choice is stored in the page address, and every feed on the page reads the same address. So two filterable feeds will always filter and page together, as though they were one.
Marking the others static="1" tells them to ignore the address entirely. They then show what their own options say, and nothing a visitor does elsewhere on the page will change them.
The usual mistake. A page with a main feed and a decorative grid, where the grid has no static="1". Search the main feed and the decorative grid quietly filters too — which looks like a bug, and is easy to miss when the grid shows pictures only.
Hiding the account bar
Blogano adds its account bar to the top of any page containing one of its shortcodes. On a landing page whose only Blogano content is a gallery, that bar is usually unwanted. nav="0" removes it.
It works per page rather than per feed, because the bar is added once to the whole page. Every Blogano shortcode on that page must carry nav="0" for the bar to go — one without it keeps the bar for everyone. So on a page with three grids, put it on all three.
Section 05
Who can see what
Blogano defines two roles of its own and reuses WordPress’s Administrator for everything above them. It also hides WordPress’s native roles — Subscriber, Contributor, Author and WordPress’s own Editor — from the role dropdown in wp-admin, so you cannot assign them by accident.
That last point matters. Blogano checks for its own roles specifically, so a member given WordPress’s native “Editor” role would not be recognised as an editor anywhere in the plugin, despite the identical name. Hiding those roles removes the trap.
| Role | Can do | Cannot do |
|---|---|---|
| Publisher | Submit posts, edit and delete their own, upload images, pin to their own bio | Publish anything, or touch anyone else’s submissions |
| Editor (Submissions) | Everything a Publisher can, plus publish, unpublish, edit and delete any member’s submissions | Change plugin settings or manage users |
| Administrator | Everything, including settings and assigning roles | — |
Everyone who registers through your [psw_register] page becomes a Publisher automatically. There is nothing to configure, and WordPress’s own “New User Default Role” setting is not used.
Why Publishers cannot publish. The name describes what they contribute, not what they control. Publishers deliberately lack permission to publish, which is the mechanism behind the whole review workflow — their submissions can only reach the feed by way of an editor. Promote someone to Editor (Submissions) when you want them reviewing other people’s work. There are three places to do it: Blogano → Users, WordPress’s own Users → All Users, or the role selector on that member’s bio page.
Logged-out visitors can read the Live Feed, the User Directory and members’ public bio pages. Reading is never restricted by role.
Section 06
The submission workflow
Every submission moves through WordPress’s own post statuses. Nothing custom, which means your normal Posts screen shows the same picture the Editorial Desk does.
| Status | What it means | Visible in the feed |
|---|---|---|
| Draft | Started but not submitted for review | No |
| Pending | Submitted, waiting for an editor | No |
| Published | Approved by an editor | Yes |
| Scheduled | Approved, set to appear at a future date | Not until its date |
The path a post takes
- A member submits. They paste a URL into the wizard. Blogano reads the page’s own title, description and image, and pre-fills the form. The member can edit anything before submitting.
- It lands as Pending. The post is created and appears on the Editorial Desk. If notifications are on, your editors get an email.
- An editor reviews. They can approve it, edit it first, or leave it. Approving sets the status to Published.
- It appears in the feed. Published submissions show up on the Live Feed page immediately, newest first.
Duplicates
Blogano checks the URL the moment it is pasted, so a member is told straight away rather than after filling in the rest of the form.
It recognises the same article written different ways — with or without www, http or https, a trailing slash, or tracking codes picked up from a share button. Two members who found the same story, one from a newsletter and one from a social post, will still be matched to each other.
The check is against the source address, so the same story published on two different sites will come through twice. That is deliberate: they are different pages, and an editor is better placed than the plugin to decide whether both belong.
Blogano fills in the details from the page you paste.
Section 07
The Editorial Desk
The Editorial Desk is the page carrying [psw_admin_dashboard]. It lists every submission on the site regardless of who wrote it, with search, filtering and sorting, and gives your editors the controls they need without sending them into wp-admin.
From here an editor can approve a pending submission, edit its title or description, unpublish something that should not have gone live, remove a submission entirely, and pin a post to the top of the feed.
The filter bar above the list shows how many results the current view holds, and each active filter appears as a small chip you can remove individually.
The Editorial Desk, with submissions awaiting review.
Reported posts. If a reader reports a post, it is flagged for your attention rather than removed automatically. Nothing disappears from your site without an editor deciding it should.
Section 08
Pinning and featuring
Blogano has two independent pinning systems, and they do different jobs.
Site pins
Set by editors from the Editorial Desk. Pinned posts appear on the Live Feed directly after the featured post, ahead of everything else. There are three slots, and each pin holds a specific position — one, two or three — so the order you choose is the order readers see, rather than whatever order you happened to pin things in.
Member pins
Set by members from their own My Posts page. These appear at the top of that member’s public bio page and nowhere else. Also three slots, also positioned.
Three, deliberately. Both limits are fixed at three. The cap keeps the top of the feed from becoming a second, permanent feed — which is what happens when pinning is unlimited and nobody remembers to unpin.
The featured post
Separately from pinning, the feed can carry one featured post across the top: the most recent submission, expanded. Turn it on with Feature Post under Cards & Feed, and choose how it looks with Featured Post Style beside it.
| Style | What it looks like |
|---|---|
| Standard | Photo beside the text, in two columns. |
| Overlay | Text laid over the photo. |
| Cardover | The photo fills the width and a card panel floats over it, carrying the same content a standard card would. |
The style is independent of the card style used by the grid beneath, so an overlay feed can have a standard featured post or the other way round.
Featured post, then pinned posts, then the feed.
Section 09
Categories and filtering
Categories are optional and off until you turn them on, under Blogano → Settings → Cards & Feed.
They are Blogano’s own list
This is the part people most often get wrong. Blogano keeps its own list of categories, typed one per line in the settings, and stores a member’s choices against the submission itself. They are not your WordPress categories, and nothing you have already set up under Posts → Categories appears here.
The practical consequences: write your list in the settings before switching the feature on, because members choosing from an empty list is a poor first impression; and you cannot assign Blogano categories from the WordPress Posts screen, only through the submission form or the Editorial Desk.
The one WordPress category. Blogano does create a single WordPress category called BLOGANO, which every submission is filed under. That exists so your submissions are distinguishable from your theme’s own posts. It is not the category system members choose from, and you do not need to do anything with it.
What members see
With categories enabled, members choose between one and three categories when submitting. Category tags then appear on feed cards.
What readers can do
Readers can filter the feed by category, and can select more than one at a time. Choosing a second category adds to the first rather than replacing it, and posts in any of the chosen categories are shown.
Each active category appears as a small chip under the search bar with an (X) beside it, so a reader can drop one and keep the rest. Alongside the chips, the bar shows how many results the current view holds. Clicking a category tag on a card, or in a list, adds that category to whatever is already selected.
Turning it on later. Submissions made before you enable categories will have none assigned. They still appear in the feed, but they will not show up under any category filter. To fix that, open each one from the Editorial Desk and assign categories there.
Section 10
Touring the settings
Blogano has a lot of settings — enough that listing them all here would produce a document nobody reads. It also generates its own complete, always-current settings reference, which is a better source for per-setting detail than anything printed can be.
The complete reference. Go to Blogano → Settings → Import / Export → Download Settings Manual. You get an HTML file listing every setting, what it does in plain language, what values it accepts, and what yours is currently set to. Because it reads your live configuration, it is always accurate for your site.
What follows is an orientation to the six tabs, so you know where to look.
Layout
Overall page structure: how wide the content sits, how much padding it gets on mobile, and how the top navigation bar behaves. If Blogano’s pages feel too wide, too narrow, or cramped on phones, this is the tab.
It also holds Nav Bar Clear, which decides whether the bar behind the navigation buttons is see-through or filled with a colour you choose. Leave it ticked and the page shows through; untick it and pick a colour, and that colour runs the full width of the screen while the buttons stay within your content width.
Buttons & Borders
The look of interactive elements — button colours, corner radius, border weights, form field styling. Mostly cosmetic matching to your theme.
Cards & Feed
The largest tab, and the one you will spend the most time in. It controls what appears on a feed card — image, title, description, date, author, category tags, share and link icons — and how each is styled. The category list lives here too.
Three settings here are worth knowing by name:
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Featured Post Style | Standard, Overlay or Cardover for the featured post, independent of the card style used below it. |
| Image Height | The height of the picture on every card. Ignored when Square is ticked, which sizes pictures from the card width instead. |
| Bio Word Limit | How much of a member’s bio appears on Directory cards. Their own bio page always shows the whole thing. |
Communication
Every message and email Blogano sends, in three groups. The logged-out sign-up block comes first — its content, background image, overlay tint and the two fallback images used when a post or a member has no picture of their own. Then the email settings and templates. Then the four site messages, such as the text shown when someone needs to log in.
The email and message groups are collapsible panels: click a title to open it. Each email has its own on/off switch on the panel title, and its BCC, subject and body inside. Text in a closed panel is still saved normally — closing a panel never discards anything.
Covered in more detail in Section 11.
Shortcodes
Where you map your pages to Blogano’s features, as described in Section 03. Also where reCAPTCHA keys go, and where the Search Engines section lives — see Section 13.
Import / Export
Bulk submission export and import, plus the settings reference download. Covered in Section 14.
Card contents are controlled from Cards & Feed.
Section 11
Email and notifications
Blogano can email your editors when something needs attention, and email members when their submission’s status changes. All of it is under the Communication tab, and all of it is optional.
| Notification | Goes to | Sent when |
|---|---|---|
| New submission | Editors | A member submits something for review |
| Post published | The author | An editor approves their submission |
| Post unpublished | The author | An editor rejects or removes it from the feed |
| Post reported | Editors | A reader flags a post |
| Email verification | New members | Someone registers, if verification is on |
There is a master switch that turns all notifications off at once, and each type can also be switched off individually from its own panel. Every email has an editable subject and body, and can carry a BCC address if you want a copy going to a shared mailbox.
Email Verification is not just an email. Its switch does more than decide whether a message goes out: with it on, a new account cannot log in until the link is clicked. With it off, registration signs the member straight in. It sits with the other four because that is where you would look for it, but it changes how registration works, not just what is sent.
Sender details
Set the From name and From address to something on your own domain. Messages sent from an address that does not match your site’s domain are far more likely to land in spam.
The Email Log
Blogano keeps a record of every message it sends, at Blogano → Email Log. Each row shows the date, which of the five types it was, who it went to, the subject, and whether the send succeeded. When new entries have arrived since you last opened it, a count appears next to the menu item, the same way comment moderation does.
This is the first place to look when a member says they never received something. It answers a specific question — did Blogano hand the message to your server, or did it never get that far? A row marked as failed points at Blogano or its settings. A row marked as sent points at your host’s mail delivery instead, which is a different problem with a different fix.
Sent does not mean delivered. A successful row means WordPress accepted the message for sending. It cannot tell you whether it reached the inbox, landed in spam, or bounced. Nothing inside WordPress can. For actual delivery tracking you need an SMTP service with its own logs.
Log retention
Log Retention sets how many days entries are kept. The default is 30. Once a day Blogano deletes anything older. Set it to 0 to keep everything indefinitely. There is also a Clear log button beside it, which empties the log immediately rather than waiting for the daily cleanup.
Why a limit exists at all. Two reasons, and the second matters more. Left unbounded the log grows forever, and on a busy site that is a table that only ever gets bigger. More importantly, every entry contains a member’s email address — so an unlimited log is an indefinite store of personal data with no retention policy attached to it. Thirty days is long enough to investigate a complaint and short enough to be defensible.
If emails never arrive. WordPress sends mail through your web server by default, and many hosts either block it or have poor deliverability. If your members report never receiving anything, the problem is almost always the host rather than Blogano. Install an SMTP plugin and route mail through a proper email service — that fixes it for every plugin on your site, not just this one.
Section 12
Registration and verification
Members sign up through your [psw_register] page. Two optional protections are worth understanding before you open registration publicly.
Email verification
With verification enabled, signing up does not sign anyone in. The new member stays on the registration page and sees a confirmation telling them to check their email, and the account that was created cannot log in yet — trying to sign in before verifying is refused with an explanation.
Clicking the link in the email does three things at once: it verifies the address, signs them in, and sends them on to where they were heading. They never type their password a second time.
Links are valid for 24 hours. If one expires, or the email never arrives, the member can request a new one — which is why you should create a page with [psw_resend_verification] on it before switching verification on. The confirmation shown after registering links straight to it.
reCAPTCHA
Blogano supports Google reCAPTCHA on its forms. You will need a site key and a secret key from Google, entered under the Shortcodes tab. Leave both blank and reCAPTCHA stays off.
Recommended starting point. For a site opening registration to the public, turn on email verification first and see whether that is enough. Add reCAPTCHA only if junk sign-ups continue — it adds friction for genuine members, and it is worth spending that friction only when you know you need to.
Section 13
Sharing and search engines
Blogano handles two things that WordPress does not do on its own: how your links look when someone shares them, and whether your link posts belong in search results.
Link previews
When someone pastes a link to one of your posts into a messaging app or a social feed, the preview card they see — picture, headline, short description, your site’s name — comes from tags in the page. WordPress does not provide them. Blogano now does, for its own posts and for members’ bio pages.
Posts with no picture of their own use the Post Fallback Image you set under Communication, so a shared link is never blank. There is nothing to switch on.
If you use an SEO plugin. Yoast, Rank Math, All in One SEO, SEOPress and The SEO Framework all produce these tags themselves. Blogano detects them and stays out of the way, because two sets of competing tags in one page is worse than one. You do not need to configure anything either way.
Keeping link posts out of search results
Under Shortcodes → Search Engines there is a setting called Hide link posts. It starts switched off, and it is worth a minute’s thought rather than a quick tick.
Here is the reasoning. A submission that links to an outside article has a page of its own on your site, holding a headline, a short summary and a link elsewhere. If Link to Source is on, no visitor ever lands there — they go straight to the original. Search engines still index it. A site with three hundred such posts and eight real pages can end up judged mostly on the three hundred, which are summaries of other people’s work.
Switching this on keeps those pages out of search results while leaving everything else alone: posts written in the editor stay indexed, bio pages stay indexed, and all your other pages are untouched. Search engines still follow the links, so nothing stops being discovered.
It applies to everything, immediately. Old posts and new alike — there is no rebuilding step. Search engines take days or weeks to re-crawl and act on the change, so do not expect the effect to be instant on their side.
Section 14
Importing and exporting
Exporting submissions
Under Import / Export, “Download Submissions CSV” produces a spreadsheet of every submission on the site — title, source URL, description, type, status, author email and date — regardless of status. Useful for backups, for reporting, and for bulk edits.
Importing submissions
The importer accepts a CSV in the same column order the export produces. The simplest reliable workflow is to export first, edit that file, and import it back, rather than building a CSV from scratch.
Non-English text in Excel. Exports are written in UTF-8 with a byte order mark, which means Arabic, Hebrew, Cyrillic and accented Latin text open correctly in Excel. If you are opening exports in an older version of Excel and see garbled characters, use Data → From Text/CSV and set the encoding to UTF-8 rather than double-clicking the file.
The settings reference
“Download Settings Manual” generates the complete per-setting document described in Section 10. Worth downloading and keeping alongside your site backups — it is the fastest way to rebuild a configuration you have lost.
Section 15
When something looks wrong
A button links to the wrong page. Almost always an unassigned page slot. Check Blogano → Settings → Shortcodes and make sure every page you have created is assigned.
A member cannot log in at all. If email verification is on, their account stays locked until they click the link they were sent. Point them at your Resend Verification page. The Email Log will confirm whether the message actually went out — see Section 11.
A member can log in but cannot publish. That is working as intended. Publishers submit; only Editors (Submissions) and Administrators publish. Promote them under Blogano → Users if they should be reviewing other people’s work.
Pasting a URL does not fill in the details. Blogano reads the title, description and image from the page being linked. Some sites block automated readers, and some do not publish that information at all. When that happens the member can type the details in by hand — the submission still works.
Nobody receives emails. See the note in Section 11. This is nearly always the host rather than the plugin, and an SMTP plugin is the fix.
A second feed on the page filters when it should not. It is missing static="1". Any feed that is not your main one should have it — see Section 04, Several feeds on one page.
A grid shows a category chip that will not go away. That grid has a category option, which locks it deliberately. A locked category is not shown as a chip in current versions; if you are seeing one, the shortcode is probably on a filterable feed rather than a static grid.
The account bar appears on a page where it is not wanted. Add nav="0" to every Blogano shortcode on that page. One shortcode without it keeps the bar for the whole page.
The feed looks wrong on phones but fine on desktop. Check Layout → Mobile Padding and Mob Nav Pad. These two are independent: the first controls your content, the second controls the navigation bar.
Something looks broken after changing settings. If your site uses a caching plugin or a CDN, clear both. Style changes are versioned so they normally update on their own, but an aggressive page cache can serve an old copy for hours.
Blogano 1.0.0 · Site Owner’s Manual