How to Create a Blog from a Data Source
Creating a blog linked to a data source.
We've already discussed how you can build a blog using static Softr blocks. However, it's also possible to create a block, storing all your content and media in one of our data sources. To do that, you can use one of our List layouts to display data from a data source. Further on, the List block can be connected to a List Details block, so that your readers can click on the list item to open the blog post on a separate page. Additionally, it's also possible to configure the List Details data to apply a unique Slug, Title, and Description and make it indexable by search engines.
To give you a better ideas of how this can be done, let's do a basic blog setup with Airtable data and take a closer look at each step involved.
Step 1: Adding content on Airtable
We're going to add a new table that has three fields: Title, Body Text, and Image.
![Adding content fields on Airtable](https://www.notion.so/image/https%3A%2F%2Fs3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com%2Fsecure.notion-static.com%2F5487d9fe-c48e-4f83-9f21-ae04210f7b3e%2Fcontent-fields-airtable.png?table=block&id=75b4a225-6912-42b0-bd9f-bf1ca3611a35&cache=v2)
For the Body Text field, we've enabled Rich Text Formatting to be able to add formatting to our content.
![Rich text formatting enabled](https://www.notion.so/image/https%3A%2F%2Fs3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com%2Fsecure.notion-static.com%2Fe9e0ada9-2b43-49d4-8aba-5956e527d056%2Fenable-rich-text.png?table=block&id=dc0073e2-bb2a-4ee0-8478-0b7898f70730&cache=v2)
Below, you can see that we've added some formatting to our body text such as bold text, headings, bullet points, etc.
![Text with formatting added](https://www.notion.so/image/https%3A%2F%2Fs3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com%2Fsecure.notion-static.com%2Fd2d46aab-a493-4f0e-b731-8dcd0489b30a%2Ftext-with-formatting.png?table=block&id=f6399131-3964-46a4-84ad-62fcba9c2c14&cache=v2)
Step 2: Linking to the table from Softr
Now, we need to add a List and List Details blocks in Softr to display the content we just added on Airtable.
Step 3: Publishing and testing
Finally, let's publish our Softr app and see what we got.
![Publishing the app and checking the results](https://www.notion.so/image/https%3A%2F%2Fs3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com%2Fsecure.notion-static.com%2Fdd931b3b-45fc-46b7-822f-00aeb4fbc333%2Fpublishing-blog.gif?table=block&id=e479f76d-82d9-49b8-abcf-8df50a087941&cache=v2)
Last updated on December 6, 2022