How to combine posts from multiple HubSpot blogs in a custom module

Difficulty Level: Advanced. This post assumes a strong understanding of HubSpot tools and technical knowledge. Insutructions are given as guidelines and may require additional customisation.

If a HubSpot website has multiple blogs, you may wish to combine posts from all of them to display on your home page.

This is how I’ve approached this problem in the past.

1/ Create your module’s fields

The first thing I do is create some editable fields on the custom module but, if you’re hard coding this information, you can skip this step: 

• Blogs: this is a “Blog” type field, and I switch on the repeater so that the user can select multiple 
• Tags (optional): this is a “Tags” type field, and I switch on the repeater as well so that the user can select multiple
• Number of Posts: this is a “Number” field where the user can select how many posts will be displayed overall (note the limitations in the “Notes” section below). I like to add this to the “Styles” tab 

This might look something like this for the Blogs and Tags fields (in both cases I’ve grouped the fields as well):

And like this for the Number of Posts field:

2/ Use HubL to combine blogs/tags

Under the HTML + HUBL field, the first thing I do is create an empty array (all_posts). 

No Tags Field

If you haven’t added a “Tags” field in Step 1 above, then you can use the following code to combine multiple blogs.

The code above:

• Creates an empty array all_posts
• Loops through all of the blogs selected in the blogs field (module.blogs_to_display.blogs)
• For each one, gets the recent posts (note the limitations in the “Notes” section below)
• For each recent post in that blog, it appends it to the all_posts array

Notes: 

• If you are not using a “Blogs” field from step 1, create an array with your blog IDs and replace module.blogs_to_display.blogs with your array.
• If you are not using a “Number of Posts field from step 1, replace module.style.general.number_of_posts with the number of posts you would like to display

Using a Tags Field

If you’re using a “Tags” field, you can use a condition to check if the user has selected any tags (if module.tags_to_display.tags|length > 0). 

If so, the code within the condition is very similar to the above code to combine multiple blogs, but does so with the blog_recent_tag_posts function. This is the full code snippet: 

Notes: 

• If you are not using a “Tags” field from step 1, create an array with your tags and replace module.tags_to_display.tags with your array
• If you are not using a “Blogs” field from step 1, create an array with your blog IDs and replace module.blogs_to_display.blogs with your array.
• If you are not using a “Number of Posts” field from step 1, replace module.style.general.number_of_posts with the number of posts you would like to display

3/ Display your posts

Now you can loop through your all_posts array and display your posts. 

In the example above:

• I’ve used [:module.style.general.number_of_posts] to limit the number fo posts. If you are not using a “Number of Posts” field from step 1, replace module.style.general.number_of_posts with the number of posts you would like to display
• I’ve used the HubL sort filter to sort the posts from newest to oldest. You can find a list of the properties that can be sorted on in the blog posts API documentation.

I’ve only included the post title above for brevity, but you can include as much post information as you’d like using blog post variables.

Notes

Some items to note:

• The blog_recent_posts HubL function allows a maximum of 200 posts to be retrieved and can only be called 10 times per page
• The blog_recent_tag_posts HubL function allows a maximum of 200 posts to be retrieved and can only be called 10 times per page.