Do not index
Do not index
Feather is a blogging platform that uses Notion as the content management system (CMS).
You simply write your articles on Notion, Feather automatically publishes them to your own SEO-optimized blog.
How does Feather work?
Every Feather blog will consist of 4 different Notion databases.
- Content Database
- Pages Database (Optional)
- Tags Database (Optional)
- Authors Database (Optional)
To create a blog on Feather, you have to tell Feather the URLs of these databases.
Once your blog site is created, Feather will start monitoring these databases and automatically publishes any changes to your blog.
For example, if you add a new item to the Content database, then Feather automatically publishes that new item as a new blog post. Similarly, if you add a new item to the Tags database, Feather automatically publishes that new item as a new tag.
What is Field Mapping?
Every blog post is essentially just a Notion page when using Feather. To be even more precise, every blog post is a page inside the content database.
But, a blog post needs certain fields for it to function properly (see below).
- Title – Title of the blog post
- Excerpt – Short summary or preview of the blog post
- Publish Date – The date on which the blog post is published
- Tags – Tags associated with the blog post
- Authors – Authors who wrote/contributed to the blog post
- …etc
If every blog post is just a Notion page, how will Feather know what these fields (like title, publish date, etc) are?
The answer is Notion Database Properties.
Feather cleverly makes use of Notion’s database properties to determine the fields that are required for the blog to function.
Field mapping is just a process where you map the Feather fields with the Notion properties.
Is there a draft mode in Feather?
Yes, Feather has a draft mode in Feather for all 4 databases (Content, Pages, Tags, Authors).
A blog post (Content database) is considered to be a draft when the Ready to Publish property is unchecked.
Whenever you are ready to publish a post, you just have to check ✅ that Ready to Publish Notion property for that blog post.
Feather will then consider that blog post to be out of the draft mode and publishes that post.
Similarly, there is a Publish field in the Pages, Tags, and Authors databases.
Whenever this Publish property is unchecked, Feather considers that item to be a draft and ignores it. The item will only be shown/published to the Feather blog when the Publish property is checked ✅.
Do we have to do the Field Mapping manually for every field?
No. Unless you have some advanced use case and want to use your own database setup, you don’t have to touch the field mapping. All of it will be done automatically.
You can just duplicate the default Notion template given by Feather, and go through the blog creation process. Feather automatically maps everything properly when you use the default Notion template provided by Feather.
Feather is designed to be flexible and customizable right from the start. That’s why it gives you all these options.
For a normal user who just wants a blog, all you need to do is duplicate the Feather’s Notion page, copy the URLs of the databases, and enter them in Feather. It will take less than 2 mins to do this.
How to publish a new blog post?
Once your blog is created, publishing a new blog post is as simple as adding a new item to your Content database. It’s really that easy.
How to schedule a blog post to be published in the future?
Feather publishes the blog post based on the Publish Date Notion property.
So, in order to schedule a blog post for some time in the future, all you have to do is set the Publish Date property to some future date. Feather will then automatically schedule your blog post to be published on that future publish date.