How to customize your blog page and sidebar

In the site editor, we're going to go into templates and blog home. And this is just going to be a blog post feed of all of your latest blog posts in reverse chronological order. The first thing we want to do is set the posts per page. So by default, it's going to be 10. It may be different depending on what theme you had before, but here you can set it to whatever you want. I'm going to set it to just four posts for now for this particular layout. Now you have just kind of a classic sidebar layout or classic blog layout with a sidebar. 

The first thing we're going to do here is look at editing the sidebar. So the sidebar is a template part and it's used in a few different places. It's used here, and it's used on the single post page if you decide to use the sidebar. Here you can edit the sidebar, and this will pull up everything that's in the sidebar right now. 

And then if you go into the list section and you'll just click on any of the sidebar sections and you can add patterns to add any new sidebar sections that you want. Those are all located under Laguna's sidebar. 

So there are a few different options here. You've got your about, if you wanted to display your latest categories, links to your favorites. Your most popular post that's already there by default. There's a highlight if you want to add a picture and have a call to action. So for, say, a travel guide or for shop your Instagram or anything like that you can add a search here. If you are using the default header, I would say you don't really need a search in your sidebar because it's already always available to the reader. But if you're using the alternative header there's not a search in that so you could go ahead and add your search to the sidebar for that. There's shop highlights if you want to have a call to action for your shop page, if you want to add follow buttons, and then finally you've got the subscribe box. 

So all of those are available for you to use in the sidebar. You can mix and match whatever you'd like. And, just like every other element in the blog editor, these are no longer widgets, these are blocks. And so you can click on anything in here and edit it to how you want. So you can click on the image, replace the image, click on the text, change that out, and the most popular, anything that's post-related. Going back to the patterns where we have our sidebar anything that's post-related like this featured post are the most popular. Those are really the only two that are post-related. 

Let's say that you don't want a sidebar at all. So what we're going to do is go to the template tab with the blog home and then click on the actions and replace template. And you can choose the one that's blog posts with no sidebar.

So now we have a blog home layout with no sidebar.

The Laguna template also comes with different templates for post layouts. So let's change this up a little bit. Let's go into the list view and we're going to click on query loop, which is what displays all of our posts. And then you'll notice there is a replace option here. So you can click place and this will load up all the different patterns you can use to display your posts. You can also customize spacing, fonts, all of that within these designs.