With the page list you would set it to show pages beneath your blog page using the page list option

Location in Website
Display pages that are located:
everywhere, beneath this page, beneath another page,

Select beneath another page and select blog as the location. If your adding it to the blog page then you would use beneath this page.

The truncate summary option right after controls how many characters from a blog should be shown so if you have this set to 140 then it will only show 140 characters as the blogs description.

This will show the page name which if clicked will take the user to the blog. It will show the description, and the thumbnail but you may need the blog thumbnail template herehttp://www.concrete5.org/marketplace/addons/blog-thumbnail/... not sure if its needed in 5.6.

Hi Ekko, thanks for your reply.

I set things as you described but the truncate option wasn't working for me. The blog page was still showing only the title of the individual blog pages. I had to click on the page list block and select > custom template > blog index to get it to show the content of the blog pages. I just sort of stumbled on to it.

That setting shows the entire text of the blog post with a "Read Full Post link below it". My next question was actually going to be, "how do I ad a read more link to my pages".

Unfortunately, I don't seem to be able to control how much text is displayed before the "Read Full Post" link. Setting the truncate summary option in the page list block doesn't change anything, it still always shows the full text of the article. I'm trying to specifically limit that to a paragraph or so.

Thank you again for the help.

This is a long-standing confusing issue. The Page List pulls it's 'sample' paragraphs from the properties of the page, not from the page content itself. Try this:

1) On the blog post page, highlight the first paragraph of the blog content and copy to your clipboard.
2) Hover over the Edit button and choose 'Properties'
3) Paste the paragraph of content into the 'Description' box.

Now your Page List should pull this content and put it under the title of the blog.

You can check out this free add-on as well:

http://www.concrete5.org/marketplace/addons/page-list-teasers/...

Another approach is to use Magic Heading to automatically keep page meta-data in sync with the page content.

Thanks for your replies gentlemen.

mhawke, I tried your instructions, it didn't seem to do anything to the page as far as I could tell. I did try the teasers add-on. With the Truncate Summaries option it did work, it stopped showing the text exactly at the right character count, but I then I lost the "Read Full Article" link, to load the full article, so that's a no go.

I can't figure out what in the custom template Blog Index uses to decide when to put in the Read Full Article link.

I guess I'm stuck in the middle somewhere..

Johnthefish. Magic heading doesn't seem to do a Read More link at a specific point in a page but I appreciate the suggestion.

I need the ability to place a Read More link in the page which is the place where the blog page shows the link to continue reading the full article.

Again, thanks for the help, if you have any other suggestions they're greatly appreciated.

I created a simple custom template that I think does what you want but it's just applied to the standard Page List, not the Blog Index template you have been trying out. You can try it out by doing the following:

Create a series of folders starting in your [root]/blocks folder so you have a path like this:



Download the attached file and rename it to 'view.php' and upload it to the new 'read_more_link' folder.

Click on your Page List block and choose 'Custom Template'. Choose 'Read More Link' from the drop-down.

Save your changes and see how she looks.

You can adjust how the 'Read more...' is displayed by editing line 20 of the view.php file you just uploaded.

Or... if you'd like to continue to use the 'Teasers' add-on, download the attached file, rename it to 'teasers_with_read_more.php' and upload it to:

'[root]/packages/page_list_teasers/blocks/page_list/templates'

You should then see an additional custom template called 'Teasers With Read More'.

Line 25 contains the 'Read more...' code if you'd like to change the way it's rendered.

Thank you very much!!! you saved my life :)

Please, I just have a question, how to put the "read more" on the same line just after the page content?
thank you very much ciao ciao

Just replace the

at the beginning of line 25 with whatever character string you'd like to display instead. I found that I liked the predictability of having the 'read more...' on a separate line but whatever floats your goat.

Thank you very much!!

Merry Christmans & Happy New 2014!!
ciaoooo

My thought was that you can use the page list for you list and read more link (or one of the numerous variation templates). But Magic Heading would overcome your issue of the metadata not reflecting what the page actually says.