Introduction

At the center of almost any content management system is the concept of pages. concrete5 pages contain reusable portions of content called blocks. Blocks can contain anything from formatted text content that you enter yourself, to photo slideshows, to videos, to custom forms that you have developed that contain special functionality. concrete5 pages are extensions of the internal Collection object, which gets its name from the fact that it contains a collection of blocks that make up the page.

Since pages on a website usually contain repeating areas of information (perhaps a sidebar with some persistent widgets), concrete5 includes the concept of page types. Page types allow you to define different templates for creating new pages in concrete5. They are used to specify a default set of blocks, content, and special attributes that are added to new pages of that type, as well as to create different visual layouts through the concrete5 website.

A common page type would be Left Sidebar, which contains a list of links in the sidebar with an area to add blocks of content on the right. A normal concrete5 installation comes with a few default page types out of the box, including Left Sidebar and Full Width. In code, page types are referred to either by their unique numerical ID in the database, or more commonly, a human readable identifier called a handle. The Left Sidebar page type, for example, would have a handle of left_sidebar.

When adding pages to a concrete5 website through the user interface, you will likely notice that the first step is choosing a page type. Page types are also used by the Composer feature of concrete5, which can assist in creating several pages of the same type (such as blog posts).

There are two types of pages in concrete5, the first being a standard page that gets added to the sitemap and gets assigned a page type, and the second a single page, which is handled a bit differently and does not get assigned a page type. This chapter will deal with pages of the first type.