If you want to build an online magazine with Elementor, JetBlog is a great plugin that you can use to add a grid section on the homepage or any are of your website.
JetBlog is a premium Elementor add-on developed by Crocoblock. This add-on is designed specifically to build dynamic websites — including online magazines. In addition to a grid section, you can also add a news ticker on the homepage of your website.
If you are building a video news website, JetBlog also allows you to add a YouTube video playlist on your website.
Widgets Offered by JetBlog
After installing JetBlog, you will have the following new widgets on your Elementor.
- Video Playlist
- Text Ticker
- Smart Posts Tiles
- Smart Posts List
- Posts Navigation
- Posts Pagination
You can use the widgets above to add the common elements of an online magazine such as news ticker, grid section, and video playlist.
# Video Playlist
You can use JetBlog to add a YouTube video playlist on your website with the Video Playlist widget. To add a playlist, you can simply paste the URL of the playlist. JetBlog also allows you to create a playlist from your YouTube channel.
If you want to add YouTube videos to the playlist from the random creators, you can also manually select the videos. Here is the example of the YouTube video playlist created with JetBlog.
Of course, JetBlog allows you to customize your playlist. You can set the typography, playlist height, thumbnail size, and so on.
# Text Ticker
On some news websites or online magazines, you will see a news ticker, a running text that is usually used to deliver a news headline, hottest issue, and so on. With the Text Ticker widget, you can also add a news ticker on your website.
You can use this widget whether to deliver the hottest issue, the trending article on your website, news headline or anything.
You can add the news ticker anywhere on your website. Whether on the header or below the grid section on the homepage. You can select the posts to appear on the news ticker from the query setting. JetBlog allows you to select posts by category, tag or post ID.
# Smart Posts Tiles
This is the widget you will love the most if you want to build an online magazine with Elementor. The Smart Posts Tiles allows you to add a grid section on the homepage of your website.
By default, this widget display the latest posts on your website, but you can set it to display posts from specific categories, tags or by post ID.
The Smart Posts Tiles offers 9 different layouts you can choose from. Each layout has a different number of boxes. You can set the gap between boxes from the Style.
Here is an example of the use of this widget.
JetBlog offers lots of setting options you can use to customize the Smart Posts Tiles widget. For instance, you can add an overlay to the boxes (solid and gradient) to make your grid section looks more attractive. Or, you might want to apply a hover effect to the grid.
# Smart Posts List
You can use this widget to display posts on your website in a more creative way. This widget is also great to be added on the homepage of your online magazine or other types of dynamic websites. Here is an example use of this widget.
The Smart Posts List widget is great to be added to the top section of the homepage of your online magazine or beneath the grid section. You can set the number of the columns as well as the number of rows according to your needs.
The posts on this widget are also filterable. You can display whether the latest posts, post from certain categories/tags or posts by ID.
The settings options you can set on the Smart Posts List widget are not much different from the Smart Posts Tiles widget. There are also settings to add an overlay to the posts and to add the hover effect.
The Bottom Line
Elementor Pro has a Posts widget to display the posts on your website. However, there is no option or widget to display the posts in a unique, creative way. JetBlog — which comes with a Smart Posts Tiles widget and a Smart Posts List widget — is a great add-on to display your posts in a more attractive way. You can display your posts in a creative grid or list as we have covered above.
This add-on also comes with a Text Ticket widget to add a news ticker on your website and a Video Playlist widget to add a YouTube video playlist to your website. JetBlog is a great plugin to create an online magazine with Elementor.
JetBlog itself is a premium Elementor add-on developed by Crocoblock. It costs you $23 per year for a single site. Or, you can also get it in a bundle with other Crocoblock plugins if you are okay spending more money.
