The Blog & News add-on brings a full-featured blogging system to your Larapen website — ideal for publishing articles, company news, tutorials, and more, with categories, tags, threaded comments, and full multi-language support.
Pricing: This is a paid add-on, available from the Larapen Marketplace.
Key Features
- Posts management — Create, edit, schedule, and publish blog posts with a rich WYSIWYG editor. Supports draft and published statuses. Translatable titles, slugs, content, excerpts, and SEO metadata.
- Categories — Organize posts into hierarchical categories using the unified categories table. Translatable names, slugs, and descriptions.
- Tags — Tag posts for flexible, cross-category grouping. Tags are translatable and stored in a dedicated table.
- Threaded comments — Built-in threaded comment system with configurable nesting depth (1–5 levels). Moderation queue with approve/delete actions, bulk operations, and auto-approval for trusted commenters. Guest commenting can be enabled or disabled.
- Featured images — Upload a featured image per post via the core media library. Automatic resizing to 1200×630px with thumbnail generation (400×250px).
- Reading time — Auto-calculated estimated reading time based on word count (configurable words-per-minute, default 200).
- View count — Track page views for each post. Powers the “Popular Posts” sidebar widget.
- Related posts — Automatically displays related posts (configurable count, default 3) based on shared categories and tags.
- Search — Full-text search across post titles and content in all locales.
- SEO-friendly — Translatable meta title, meta description, and clean URL slugs per post and category.
- Email notifications — Notify admins of new comments. Notify comment authors when someone replies to their comment.
- CAPTCHA support — Optional CAPTCHA verification on the comment form, integrated with the core CAPTCHA system.
- Multilingual — All content fields are fully translatable via Spatie Translatable. Localized front-end URLs with locale prefix.
Admin Panel
| Section | Description |
|---|---|
| All Posts | List, search, filter by status and category, and manage all blog posts. |
| Add New | Create a new blog post with the WYSIWYG editor. |
| Categories | Manage blog categories (create, edit, delete). Supports one level of nesting. |
| Tags | Manage blog tags with translatable names and slugs. |
| Comments | Review and moderate comments — approve, delete, filter by status, and apply bulk actions. |
| Settings | Configure posts per page, related posts count, reading time, comment settings, notifications, and CAPTCHA. |
Front-end
- Blog index page with paginated post listing, sidebar with categories, recent posts, popular posts, and tags.
- Individual post pages with featured image, content, author, date, reading time, view count, tags, post navigation, related posts, and threaded comments.
- Category and tag archive pages with the same layout as the main listing.
- Search page with results across all post titles and content.
- Comment forms with threaded replies, guest support, and optional CAPTCHA.
Configuration
| Setting | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Posts per page | 10 | Number of posts on the blog index and archive pages. |
| Related posts count | 3 | Number of related posts shown at the bottom of each post. |
| Words per minute | 200 | Average reading speed used to calculate estimated reading time. |
| Comments enabled | Yes | Enable or disable the comment system globally. |
| Require approval | Yes | Guest comments must be approved by an admin. Authenticated users are auto-approved. |
| Allow guest comments | No | Whether non-logged-in visitors can post comments. |
| Max comment depth | 2 | Maximum nesting level for threaded replies (1–5). |
| Auto-approve trusted | No | Auto-approve comments from emails with a previously approved comment. |
| CAPTCHA for comments | No | Require CAPTCHA verification when posting comments. |
Dependencies
None — the Blog add-on works independently. It integrates with the core media library for featured images.
Ideal for
- Company news and announcements.
- Content marketing and SEO strategies.
- Tutorials, guides, and knowledge sharing.
- Personal blogs integrated into your website.
- Multi-language content publishing.