In this recipe, we will be loading a page type with the handle of left_sidebar. Please make sure that page type exists in your concrete5 installation, otherwise you can add a new page type with that handle, or adapt the recipe to work for your situation.

Here's how we would load the page type with a handle of left_sidebar. This is similar to loading a page by its path. The steps are as follows:

A simple database query is performed, which will return a CollectionType object if it is successful.

Just like the warning for loading pages by their paths, you will want to exercise the same good judgment when loading page types by their handles. Since these handles are just strings that can be edited through the concrete5 interface, you will need to make sure that you aren't writing code that could break if one of the site editors changes the handle of a page type.