How to Set Up a Blog in Your Magento Store?

In the world of web development blog is seen as one of most effective ways to connect with the audience. It is not an outright form of advertisement but a passive way of promoting your business. When it comes to ecommerce website development, a blog becomes ever more important as it can translate to direct sale of products and services. With Magento development becoming the most preferred way of building online stores, setting up a blog in Magento store is one of the most sought after thing. This helps in achieving higher ranking for your store on the search engines and helps you solve customer queries in a personalized manner.

To start with blog functionality is not included by default in Magento website development and you will need to additionally set it up in your store. Magento developers can easily set up a blog within the admin of the Magento CMS which allows you keep posting and editing using a WYSIWYG editor. The ideal way to set up a blog is with the use of a plugin or extension as it is called in Magento. Since WordPress is the most popular blogging platform in the world you can use Lazzymonks WordPress Integration to set up a blog in your Magento store. This extension is freely available and offers you amazing results.

Steps to Install Lazzymonks WordPress Integration Extension

1. To start with get the Magento extension key from Magento connect. In the present version Lazzymonks WordPress Integration 2.61 the key is called magento-community/Mage_Blog. In simple terms you are downloading the WordPress plugin.

2. In the next step upload WordPress directory into a Magento sub-directory called “wordpress” (magento/wordpress). This is done as the WordPress blog will perform as part of the online store.

3. You also need to configure the MySQL database and this can be done by adding Magento’s database information into WordPress’s wp-config.php file. All the Wordpress files will be stored in this pre-existing database. With these steps done we are ready to set up the blog in your online store.

4. Next go to Connect Manager, you can use the path System > Magento Connect > Magento Connect Manager and on the Settings tab, change the Preferred State to ‘beta’. This is done to let users known that you are still in the testing phase with your blog.

5. In the admin menu click on the Extensions tab and paste the Magento extension key that you had acquired earlier in the box and click Install. Make sure that the new extension shows up at the bottom of the page. Once this is done go to the Settings tab and change the Preferred State to ‘stable’

6. Set up the directories and the sub-directories in the settings tab. You can also change the blog address in this step and shift the index level. In this step. In the permalinks tab and ensure that permalinks are set to default.

7. Now your blog is almost ready and the only thing that you need to do is to configure the Lazzymonks WordPress Integration in Magento’s back-end admin. This can be easily done visiting System > Configuration > Blog. 

The above steps clearly show that the process of setting up a blog in Magento store tests the skills and expertise of a developer. Thus you need to make sure that you hire the services of only an expert Magento developer for your ecommerce website development. Do a background check on the Magento website development company and make sure they have developed custom stores in the past. An expert hand is all the difference between an average and an excellent online store.