We have moved!

You are currently looking at documentation for Umbraco 8 and older versions.
Go to docs.umbraco.com/umbraco-cms/tutorials/creating-a-basic-website/article-parent-and-article-items for documentation for Umbraco 9 and newer versions.

    Articles and Article Items - A Parent Page with Infinite Children

    Having an Articles Parent page, and a number of associated child articles, provides a good example of Umbraco's features. We'll assume our fictional company, Widgets Ltd, writes about ten articles a month and want the articles page to act like a blog. You could use this functionality for news, event pages, or any other collection of Document Types.

    Creating Articles and Article Items

    Create two new Document Types with template: Articles Main and Articles Item.

    To create Articles Main Document Type, follow these steps:

    1. Go to Settings.

    2. Select ... next to the Document Types in the Settings tree.

    3. Click Document Type with Template.

      Document Type with template

    4. Enter a Name for the Document Type. Let's call it Articles Main.

    5. Let's add two fields with the following specifications:

      Group Field Name Alias Data Type
      Intro Articles Title articlesTitle TextBox
      Intro Articles Body Text articlesBodyText Rich Text Editor

      Articles Main Document Type Data Properties

    6. Click Save

    To create Articles Item Document Type, follow these steps:

    1. Go to Settings.

    2. Select ... next to the Document Types in the Settings tree.

    3. Click Document Type with Template.

      Document Type with template

    4. Enter a Name for the Document Type. Let's call it Articles Item.

    5. Let's add two fields with the following specifications:

      Group Field Name Alias Data Type
      Content Article Title articleTitle TextBox
      Content Article Content articleContent Rich Text Editor

      Article Item Document Type Data Properties

    6. Click Save

    Updating the Document Type Permissions

    To update Articles Main Document Type permissions:

    1. Navigate to the Home Page Document Type and go to the Permissions tab.

    2. Select Add child in the Allowed child node types. The Choose child node window opens.

    3. Select Articles Main and click Save.

    4. Navigate to the Articles Main Document Type and go to the List View tab.

    5. Toggle Enable List view and click Save.

      Enabling List View

    6. Go to the Permissions tab.

    7. Select Add child in the Allowed child node types. The Choose child node window opens.

    8. Select Articles Item and click Save.

    To update Articles Item Document Type permissions:

    1. Navigate to the Articles Item Document Type and go to the Permissions tab.
    2. Select Add child in the Allowed child node types. The Choose child node window opens.
    3. Select Articles Item and click Save.

    Creating the Content Node

    To add a content node:

    1. Go to Content.

    2. Select ... next to the HomePage and select Articles Main.

    3. Enter the name for the article. We are going to call it Articles.

    4. Enter the Article Title, Article Content, and click Save. When you click on Save, you will notice an empty list view is created.

      We still need to add the child nodes which will be displayed in the list view making it easier to view them. You can create new nodes from this section.

      If you do not see the list view, try refreshing the page.

    5. Let's add two child nodes called Article 1, Article 2, and click Save and Publish.

      Content Tree With Articles

    Updating the Template

    To update the Articles Main template, follow these steps:

    1. Go to Settings.

    2. Expand the Templates folder in the Templating section. You should see a template titled Articles Main.

    3. Select Master in the Master template and click Save.

    4. Open the Custom Umbraco Template folder.

    5. Copy the contents of Blog.html and paste the content into Articles Main below the closing curly brace "}".

      Take care when pasting the template not to overwrite the first line @inherits Umbraco.Web.Mvc.UmbracoViewPage<ContentModels.ArticlesMain>. If you get an error when loading the page ensure the last part in <> brackets matches your Document Type alias.

    6. Remove everything from the <html> (around line 8) to the end of the </div> tag (around line 43) which is the header and navigation of the site since it is already mentioned in the master template.

    7. Remove everything from the <!-- Footer --> tag (around line 92) to the end of the </html> tag (around line 139)

    8. Replace the static text within the <h1> tags (around line 12) with the Model.Value reference to articlesTitle.

    9. Replace the static text within the <div> tags (from line 22 to 28) with the Model.Value reference to articlesBodyText.

      Articles Main Template

    10. Define a query for all articles, just below the <h3> tag (around line 30) of the <!-- Latest blog posts --> section.

      Query Builder

    11. You can set conditions to get specific articles or decide the order of the articles. For the purpose of this guide, we'll use the following parameters:

      Query parameters

    12. If you've set the correct parameters, you will get a preview of the items being selected with the query. Click Submit, and you will see a code snippet has been added to your template. It will look similar to this:

      @{
    var selection = Umbraco.Content(Guid.Parse("c5ed4ea3-f9ea-4c37-a798-fe7892c98b95"))
    .ChildrenOfType("articlesItem")
    .Where(x => x.IsVisible())
    .OrderByDescending(x => x.CreateDate);
}
<ul>
    @foreach (var item in selection)
    {
        <li>
            <a href="@item.Url">@item.Name</a>
        </li>
    }
</ul>

    13. The above code will output a list of all the Article Items as links using the name. We will modify the template a little, to add more information about the articles. Replace the HTML in the foreach loop with this snippet:

      <article class="special">
        <div class="articledate" > @item.CreateDate </div>
        <div class="articletitle"><a href="@item.Url">@item.Name</a></div>
        <div class="articlepreview">@Html.Truncate(item.Value("articleContent").ToString(), 20, true)<a href="@item.Url">Read More..</a></div>
</article>

    14. Click Save.

    To update the Articles Item template, follow these steps:

    1. Go to Settings.

    2. Expand the Templates folder in the Templating section. You should see a template titled Articles Item.

    3. Select Master in the Master template and click Save.

    4. Open the Custom Umbraco Template folder.

    5. Copy the contents of Blogpost.html and paste the content into Articles Item below the closing curly brace "}".

      Take care when pasting the template not to overwrite the first line @inherits Umbraco.Web.Mvc.UmbracoViewPage<ContentModels.ArticlesMain>. If you get an error when loading the page ensure the last part in <> brackets matches your Document Type alias.

    6. Remove everything from the <html> (around line 8) to the end of the </div> tag (around line 43) which is the header and navigation of the site since it is already mentioned in the master template.

    7. Remove everything from the <!-- Footer --> tag (around line 104) to the end of the </html> tag (around line 151)

    8. Replace the static text within the <h1> tags (around line 12) with the Model.Value reference to articleTitle.

    9. Replace the static text within the <div> tags (from line 23 to 38) with the Model.Value reference to articleContent.

      Articles Item Template

    10. Click Save.

    Check your browser, you should now see something similar to the screen below.

    Finished Articles section

    Prev: Setting The Navigation Menu                   Next: Adding Language Variants