Need help: Multiple Listing channels with one template. DRY

Question

I have several Listing channels that all use the same templates:

E.g.

Templates:

• /templates/view/overview.html
• /templates/view/detail.html

Channels

• News
• Research Updates
• Upcoming Events

How can I only list the entries for each channel at their respective URL without having to duplicate the templates?

E.g.

"http://mysite.com/news" should only list the the latest 20 news stories with links to the detail page.

{% for entry in craft.entries.section('news', 'research', 'events').limit(20).find() %}
<div class="col-sm-6">
    <h2 class="Heading"><a href="{{ entry.url }}" title="{{ entry.title }}">{{ entry.title }}</a></h2>
    <p class="Date">{{entry.postDate|date('M j, Y')}}</p>
    <p>{{ excerpt|length > 250 ? excerpt|slice(0, 200) ~ '...' : excerpt  }}</p>
    <p><a href="{{ entry.url }}" title="{{ entry.title }}" class="ReadMore">Read More</a></p>
</div>                          

{% endfor %}

Answer 1

A good option here is to make use of craft.request. As long as the URL is the section handle, you can do something like this:

{% current_section = craft.request.firstSegment %}

{% for entry in craft.entries.section(current_section).limit(20).find() %}
...
{% endfor %}

If the url is mysite.com/news, firstSegment will return 'news', which you can use in your craft.entries call.

UPDATE:

If your URLs need to be different than the section handles, make use of Twig's include with tag. For each section, you will need an index.html template with the following:

{% set current_section = 'thisSectionHanle' %}
{% include listPage.html with current_section %}

listPage.html can be the template that has the actual fetch and display logic. Using include with, listPage.html will have access to the current_section variable.

So not perfectly dry, but the main logic chunk will not have to be repeated.