I’m liking the SharePoint 2013 Blog Site Enhancements

As I continue our journey of moving our SharePoint platform and content over to SharePoint 2013, I wanted to take a moment and pass along some of the improvements I’ve noticed in SharePoint 2013 blogs (as you may know, I’m a big fan of Blogs or Shhh, we don’t call them blogs, we call them knowledge managers… reference: Knowledge Blogging on Canadian IT Pro Site).

So far, I’m a big fan of the changes. Tidy is the word that comes to mind.

And a reminder. I don’t use the web page interface for creating my blog posts. I use either (and if you aren’t, you may want to explore these “blogging apps”):

Microsoft Word or Windows Live Writer from a PC
SharePlus when on my Mobile Device (iPad/iPhone and I believe the functionality exists in their Android version too)

Key Changes/Enhancements

Content Approval is no longer on by default – yep, that’s right. Content Approval is not enabled by default on the Posts list anymore. More times than not, I prefer to turn it off (though of course it has good reason to be on in situations where you need moderation). Having it off by default makes more sense though, for most situations
3 Choices for layouts for Categories and Posts – this is my favourite enhancement. Right out of the gate, I have 3 choices I can set for how Blogs will be displayed on the Home Page as well as how the categories are presented. For your viewing pleasure, I’ve demo’d those below

Blog Layouts

Here are the three different layouts that come with SharePoint 2013 Blogs out of the gate. I’ve listed the category display of them first followed by the home page view.