How should an index page be setup/defined in Craft?

Question

Site construct question...

I have categories. Craft knows where to find the template for a category - i.e. markets/{slug}.

But I also have a Markets (categories) page with the first 6 entries for each category (market). The template is markets/index.html.

The same holds true for and index page with all my entries. Craft knows where to find an entry posts/_entry - but what about the posts/index page?

How should these pages be setup/defined in Craft - should they be a single page or something else?

Background - Right now, they aren't defined in Craft - but I realize that I probably need to add them to work with an SEO plugin.

Answer 1

Depending on the rest of your site structure, yes you can set these up as Singles.

Your other option is to use an Entry Type inside a 'pages' Structure, and in that template you list the first 6 categories in a defined Category Group (possibly selected in a dropdown, or through craft.request.segment() )

Documentation link on how Craft looks for index templates in case it's useful: https://docs.craftcms.com/v3/templates.html#index-templates.

Answer 2

Unless taking the structure route because there's a need for multiple index pages, I generally create a Single for each index page.

In your case I'd probably create two singles called 'Markets / Overview' and 'Pages / Overview'. I wouldn't display those titles necessarily in the template but I've found displaying 'Name of section / Overview' within the control panel helps the client.

This assumes the index page needs to be editable at all, but normally I find I need a couple of meta fields on every page on the site.