Launch a content operation in SGEN
How to set up your editorial workflow from categories and author profiles to comments and notifications
Running a content operation in SGEN means more than writing posts. You need a consistent structure your whole team can follow — categories and tags that stay clean, author profiles that appear automatically on every post, archive pages search engines can understand, images with proper descriptions, and a comment queue that does not pile up overnight. This walkthrough builds that structure step by step across seven surfaces, from the first click to the first published post.
Fixture. your business is used throughout. Their editorial team: an editor (editor), a teammate (founder and occasional contributor), a developer (sourcing writer). Their blog covers three topics: origin stories, brewing guides, and company news.
Audience. Teams of two or more people publishing to the SGEN blog on a regular cadence — weekly or more. Solo authors publishing occasionally can skip the author-profile steps and pick up everything else.
What is this for?
A content operation is the system behind consistent publishing. On SGEN it spans seven surfaces, each independently configurable but strongest when wired together:
- Blog — the post list, the draft/publish cycle, the revision history.
- Categories and Tags — the taxonomy that makes the archive browsable and gives every category its own public URL.
- Custom Objects + Custom Fields — author profiles and origin metadata attached to every post via structured fields.
- SEO (Blogs) — the archive title, meta description, and permalink pattern that controls how search engines see the blog.
- Media Library — alt text on every image, which both improves accessibility and contributes to image search.
- Discussions — the comment moderation queue, approval flow, and spam filter.
- Email Settings — the SMTP transport and sender identity that all notification emails use.
Run through these seven steps once at launch. After that, the system mostly runs itself: authors write posts, the taxonomy and profiles apply automatically, SEO defaults protect unconfigured posts, and notifications tell the right people when something needs attention.
Good use cases
Example 1: Structured editorial launch — your business sets up from scratch.
an editor is building your business' blog before the first post goes live. She works through all seven steps in a single session: categories, tags, author profiles, SEO defaults, alt-text policy, moderation settings, and notification routing. The whole setup takes under an hour. After that, every post Grace or Alan publishes inherits the taxonomy, profiles, SEO floor, and routing automatically — no repeated setup.
Example 2: Adding a new author mid-operation.
Six months in, your business hires a fourth writer. Alan creates a new Author Custom Object entry for the new hire — bio, headshot, social links — and the Author Profile custom field group already assigned to Blog means the new author can fill in their details on their first post immediately. No template changes. No admin rebuild. The system absorbs the new person.
Example 3: Recovering from a taxonomy mistake.
Grace realized that "Coffee Culture" (a category she created at launch) overlaps with "Origin Stories." She reassigns every post in "Coffee Culture" to "Origin Stories," deletes the now-empty "Coffee Culture" category, and adds a Redirect from /blog/coffee-culture to /blog/origin-stories so any shared links still land. No posts are lost. The old URL stops returning an error. The reader sees a unbroken archive.
What NOT to use this for
Renaming a slug changes every post URL that includes it. Add a 301 redirect in Redirects from the old path to the new one before you save the rename.
The tag search surface is currently limited — it returns an error page on some queries. Add and rename tags one at a time from the Blog → Tags list. Use category filters or admin-wide search if you need to find posts by topic in volume.
Author profiles need their own Custom Object type so each person gets a dedicated URL, a consistent field set, and a clean admin list. A Page-per-author breaks the relationship between the Author field group and the post.
Notification emails go undelivered if SMTP is not connected. Confirm email delivery first (Step 6), then set notification routing (Step 7).
SGEN removes the term assignment from every post immediately on delete. Posts with only that category become uncategorized. Reassign posts first, then delete the empty term.
How this connects to other features
(01-create-and-manage-blog-posts.md) — every post inherits the taxonomy, profiles, SEO defaults, and notification routing you build in this workflow.
(02-organize-with-categories-and-tags.md) — Step 2 of this workflow; that doc has the full category/tag reference including the tag limitation note.
(01-create-a-custom-field-group.md) — Step 3 uses custom field groups to wire author profiles to blog posts; read that doc for all field type options.
(01-create-custom-object-types.md) — the Author Custom Object type built in Step 3 is documented in full there.
(04-set-blog-archive-seo.md) — Step 4 of this workflow; that doc covers permalink structure tradeoffs in detail.
(01-moderate-comments-and-reviews.md) — Step 5 of this workflow; that doc covers reply threading and bulk moderation.
(03-configure-email.md) — prerequisite for Step 7; confirms SMTP before any notification routing makes sense.
Before you start
See configure SMTP and transactional email if you have not done this yet.
- You are signed in to SGEN as an admin.
- You have decided on three to five blog topics — these become your categories.
- You have a list of every person who will publish posts, along with their names and email addresses.
- You have uploaded any team headshots to the Media Library — you will need the image filenames or IDs in Step 3.
- Your SMTP email is configured under Settings → Email Settings — notifications in Step 7 will not deliver without it.
Where to go
All seven steps start from the left navigation in the SGEN admin. Each step below states the exact path:
| Step | Admin path |
|---|---|
| 1 — Content types | Custom Objects → Add New |
| 2 — Taxonomy | Blogs → Categories and Blogs → Tags |
| 3 — Author profiles | Custom Objects → Author then Custom Fields → Add New |
| 4 — Archive SEO | SEO → Blogs SEO |
| 5 — Comment moderation | Discussions → Settings then Discussions → All Discussions |
| 6 — Alt-text policy | Media → Settings |
| 7 — Notifications | Settings → Email Settings |
Steps
Every SGEN blog has one built-in post type: Blog Post. Posts are the standard content type for anything with a date and an author — you do not need to create this, it exists by default.
What you may need to create are Custom Object types for structured content that lives alongside posts. For your business, two types are useful:
- Author — each team member gets one entry: bio, headshot, social links.
The Author field group (Step 3) links each post to one of these entries.
- Origin — each coffee origin gets its own detail page: country, altitude, processing method, tasting notes.
Go to Custom Objects → Add New. Give the type a name (singular: "Author"), leave Slug to auto-generate, and set a URL prefix (e.g. team). Click Publish. The new type appears in the left sidebar under its own section. Repeat for Origin.
After Step 3, each Author entry will be linkable from Blog posts via a custom field, and readers can follow that link to read more about the person who wrote it.
Open Blogs → Categories. Use the left-column form to create your top-level topic buckets. your business starts with three:
Click Add new category after each one. After creating all three, the right-hand table shows Name, Description, Slug, and a live post count:
Now open Blogs → Tags and add your initial tag set. Tags are cross-cutting keywords — a post in "Origin Stories" can carry the tag yirgacheffe; a post in "Brewing Guides" can carry the same tag if it discusses that origin. Start with six to eight tags and add more as you publish.
Important: add one tag at a time using the left-column form. The tag search box is currently limited and returns an error page on some queries — use the tag list as your reference and avoid relying on the search box for this version. This will be resolved in a future update.
Every category and every tag gets a public archive URL. Here is the full URL map for your business' three categories and their initial tags:
Author profiles connect a person to the posts they write. SGEN does not ship a built-in author post type — you build one using the Custom Object type from Step 1 and a Custom Field group that links each post to an author entry.
3a. Create Author entries as Custom Object records. Go to Custom Objects → Author → Add New. For each team member, create one entry. Fill in Name (display name), Title/Role, Bio (two to three sentences), Headshot (Media Library image filename), and an optional social or contact link.
After creating all three your business team members, the Author list looks like this:
3b. Create an Author Profile custom field group. Go to Custom Fields → Add New. Create a field group named Author Profile. Add at minimum: Author Name (Text), Author Role (Text), Author Bio (Textarea), Author Headshot (Text — holds the Media Library image filename), and Author URL (URL — links to the Author Custom Object entry page). Set Location to Blog. Set Status to Publish. Click Create Item.
After saving, every blog post edit screen shows an Author Profile panel below the main content area. Authors fill in their own values on each post. Place this shortcode block in your blog post template wherever the author card should appear:
When Alan publishes his next post and fills in his Author Profile fields, readers see his name, role, bio, and headshot automatically — no per-post HTML required.
Open SEO → Blogs SEO. This screen sets two things at once: the permalink pattern every new post will use, and the default SEO title and meta description for the /blog archive.
Set these once at launch. Every new post inherits the defaults until an author fills in per-post SEO — per-post values always win over the defaults you set here.
Recommended settings for your business:
After clicking Save Changes, every new post published by Grace, Ada, or Alan inherits the "Brewing Journal — your business" title and archive description as its SEO fallback.
Open Discussions → Settings. Before your first post goes live, configure which content types accept comments and what the moderation rules are:
- Who can comment — anonymous visitors, registered users only, or nobody.
- Require manual approval — recommended for new blogs; switch to auto-approve later once you trust your spam rate.
- Reply depth — how many levels of nested replies to show (2 is a solid default).
- Close comments after N days — useful for older posts that attract spam long after they stop getting organic traffic.
After configuring settings, open Discussions → All Discussions and work through any pending items. Triage becomes a fast weekly habit once the rules are set:
For bulk spam cleanup: click the Pending tab, tick the master checkbox, pick Mark as Spam from the Bulk actions dropdown, and click Apply. The Pending count drops to zero; the Spam count rises by the number of rows moved.
Open Media → Settings. The only toggle on this screen is Enable AI Media Captions.
When turned on, every image uploaded to the Media Library gets an auto-generated suggestion in the Description / Alt text field. Authors can accept, edit, or replace the suggestion before saving. This reduces the number of blank alt-text fields significantly on high-volume blogs.
When turned off, the alt-text field starts blank on every upload and must be filled manually.
Recommended for a team blog: turn AI Media Captions on for your initial backlog of existing images. After the backlog is cleared, decide whether to keep it on or review manually. Either way, build a habit of checking the Description field before publishing any post. A blank alt-text field means that image is invisible to screen readers and contributes nothing to image search.
For posts by Alan — field photography, origin farms — alt text should describe what the photo shows: "Farmer sorting coffee cherries at the Gedeo Zone cooperative, Ethiopia" — not a filename or generic label.
Open Settings → Email Settings. Confirm your SMTP configuration is saved and the Send Email test returns a delivery confirmation before relying on notification routing — notifications are dead letters if SMTP is not connected.
Once SMTP is confirmed, save the sender identity that all system emails will use:
Comment notification routing. When a reader leaves a comment on a blog post, SGEN sends a notification to the admin email address set in Settings → General. Set this to a shared editorial inbox (hello@yourdomain.com) if you want the whole team to see it — the notification goes to one address only.
Author digest. SGEN does not ship a per-author notification digest. For workflows where individual authors need to know when their post receives a comment, route the admin notification to a shared inbox and set up a forwarding filter at your email provider. Comments on posts by Alan, for example, can forward to alan@yourdomain.com via a subject-line filter.
What success looks like
You are ready to publish regularly when all seven steps produce these outcomes: The post edit form shows those categories in the Categories picker. The post edit form shows them in the Tags picker. The Author Profile field group is assigned to Blog and set to Publish. A test post created by each author shows their fields filled in. Opening /blog in a browser shows the title you set in the browser tab. The Pending tab shows zero outstanding items before the first post goes live. At least one test image has a non-blank alt-text field. The Send Email diagnostic returns a confirmation. A test comment on a draft post triggers a notification email to the admin inbox.
- Categories: three to five rows in Blog → Categories, each with a Name, Slug, and Description.
What to do if it does not work
Categories or tags not showing on the post edit form. Reload the post edit page after creating the terms. The picker refreshes on page load, not in real time.
Author Profile field group not appearing on the post edit screen. Open Custom Fields and confirm the Author Profile group's Location is set to Blog and Status is Publish. Draft status hides the group from all edit screens.
Tag search returned an error page. The tag search surface is currently limited. Close the error, return to Blog → Tags, and scroll the list to find the tag you need. Add new tags via the left-column form — the list view is reliable; the search box is not on this version.
Blog archive SEO title not updating on the public site. Confirm you clicked Save Changes and saw a confirmation. Clear your browser cache, then reload /blog. If the old title still appears, a caching layer may be serving the previous version — flush the cache or wait for the TTL to expire.
Notification email not arriving. Confirm SMTP is saved and the Send Email test delivered successfully. Check your admin email address in Settings → General — that is the single address all comment notifications go to. Check spam and promotions folders.
Comment moderation queue growing faster than you can clear it. Switch to require manual approval in Discussions → Settings if you are on auto-approve. For spam surges, use bulk Mark as Spam from the Pending tab. Enable "Close comments after N days" to stop older posts from becoming spam targets.
Related reading
primary_keyword fixed to "content operation in SGEN" — matches H1 verbatim Build sequence: 7 numbered steps under ### Steps (#### 1–7) Fixture brand: your business — an editor (editor), a teammate (founder), a developer (sourcing writer) Pile docs cited: blog/01-03, custom-fields/01, custom-objects/01, seo/04, media-library/04, discussions/01, settings/03 Tag limitation: customer-voice framing only — no bug ID in body Mocks: 8 (admin-edit-form x2, admin-list-view x3, code-output-panel x2, settings-save-success x1) Code blocks: 2 (taxonomy URL map, author card shortcode) Named Examples: 3 Dev-isms: 0 / Bug IDs: 0 / Classification: PUBLIC
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