How to have an entry open into a standalone page

Question

I am working on my first EE site and also my first site in general so I am a bit new to this. However, things have been going fairly well but I need some assistance on this topic.

I am creating a tutorial site so I plan on having recent content quite frequently. I have categories set up so users can go to certain topic pages and also my most recent video is large for viewers to see. However, since the splash page is a little bit of a summary page, I want users to click into a page to view the content. Here is a link to what I am referring to http://greyscalegorilla.com/blog/

As you can see his splash page showcases all of his tutorials, and when you click on the title you go into a standalone page for just that content. I don't know what terms I would type into search engines to even start looking for how to solve this. I saw the Pages module in EE and I am not sure is that something I need to use? Just looking for a little bit of assistance so I can start looking for how to create that effect. Any help is greatly appreciated! Thanks everyone!

Answer 1

You don't need the Pages module for this, what you want is just a standard entry or post page.

You can read, 'How To Display a Channel Entry'- here on StackExchange, it deals with the same issue.

But the basics are, you want your blog links, to link to the display/post template. So from your blog view:

{exp:channel:entries channel="blog" limit="10" sort="entry_date" order="desc"}

<h2><a href="{comment_url_title_auto_path}">{title}</a></h2>
{blog}
<hr />

{/exp:channel:entries}

The {comment_url_title_auto_path} will provide the correct linking url, if you've set-up the channel details properly. If you haven't or want to just custom build the link, then use…

{exp:channel:entries channel="blog" limit="10" sort="entry_date" order="desc"}

<h2><a href="http://mydomain.org/blog/entry/{url_title}">{title}</a></h2>
{summary}
<hr />

{/exp:channel:entries}

Where entry is a reference to a template in the template_group, blog. The name can be whatever you like: entry, details, article, post, etc.

Once the basic link is established, you then need to set-up the individual post display template. I'm going to keep calling it entry.

{exp:channel:entries channel="blog" limit="1"}

<h2>{title}</h2>
{blog}
<hr />

{/exp:channel:entries}

And that's basically it. Obviously you need to style and format the page. If you aren't using a {summary} field, you probably want to limit the number of words or characters displayed on the list view/splash page. But the basic display of a full post is fairly easy, making sure you point to the right template is probably the confusing part for most newbies.