Creating the Article Views

Now that the Article forms have been setup, we finally get to display the articles using, you guessed it, a template.

by Kelly Ford · August 6, 2014

We are making great progress. Next up, let's create the list or "headline" view of the articles.

Creating the Headlines View

From the Manage Templates page on the Control Panel, click the button to create a new template and fill in the dialog as you see below.
In the Choose Fields control, select the following fields (not all of them are visible in the screen shot)
ArticleId, AuthorId, Title, Synopsis, Published
In the Choose Detail Fields control, select
ArticleId, AuthorId, Title, Synopsis, Body, Published

For the Buttons tab, leave all the buttons checked and set to their defaults. Click Save to generate your template.
Once you click Save, your template will be generated. Give it the name Articles_Headlines as you see in the image below. You do not need to edit the code at this point. Then click the Save button.
Next, go to the page you've created to display your Articles and configure your XMod Pro module to use the Articles Form and Articles template we've created:
Click the Save Changes button and your Articles module is all ready to go.
There's not much to see here yet because we haven't added any articles. Go ahead and click the New link to add some now.

All the links work. You can Edit your articles, Add new ones, Delete existing articles, and view each article's Details. Congratulations, you have a fully-functional basic article management system -- all without a single line of code.
From this point, everything else is just a matter of tweaking... removing fields you don't need, and adding HTML and CSS to styling your listings. Let's do some of that now.

What's Next?

In the next article we're going to style this template. For that we'll talk about one way XMod Pro makes adding CSS painless.