How to recreate the blog and blog entry page types in 5.7

This is a community-contributed tutorial. This tutorial is over a year old and may not apply to your version of Concrete CMS.
May 6, 2015

Anatomy of a page type - Blog and Blog Entry.

There are four basic templates that come with the Elemental theme.
1. Blank - blank.php
2. Full - full.php (which is default with a different name)
3. Left Sidebar - left_sidebar.php
4. Right Sidebar - right_sidebar.php

In the Elemental theme, there are all sorts of pages that look very different from the four basic page templates. All those variations come from custom layouts. Custom layouts allow you to split areas into columns. You can even split columns up into more columns.

There are a series of steps to make each page type.
1. add the template
- Dashboard > Pages & Themes > Page Templates
- Add Template
2. fill out its basic details
3. edit its compose form
4. set the defaults for the page templates

In Concrete CMS 5.7, page types and page templates are separate. This allows you to create a page type and defaults for how the information will be displayed on different page templates. A page type could have a sidebar template, full template, custom template, and any other variation you could think of. A page type can also be restricted to one specific template.

When setting the page type defaults on the page templates, you will be using blocks to set the different attributes and properties on the page. The most common will be the Page Title block, Page Attribute Display block, and Composer Control block. Other blocks will be used to add comments, date navigation, page lists, etc.

Attached is a png of screenshots with annotations of what specifically is included in the Elemental theme Blog and Blog Entry.

annotated screenshots

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