How to customize your single post page template and blog post content

In the site editor we'll go to templates and single posts and that will load your single post template. By default the single post template has a sidebar but there's also an option to use a no sidebar layout. If you want to switch to the no sidebar layout you'll go to the templates tab over here where it's a single post, click on the three dot actions menu, replace template and choose the blog post with no sidebar. 

Remember that you can click on any of these areas to customize them to your needs. So if you want to add the author or other information to the postmeta like tags, you can do so here. You can change the display of how your title is designed if you want to customize the typography for it, any of the spacing options. And you can customize the post footer as well with any additional information you want to add. By default, it's going to show categories and tags and it will only show those if a category or tag is set for the post. 

With the sidebar, by default, you're going to have the sidebar as template part that displays the sidebar on different pages so they all match. And again, just like the blog post page, if you want to customize your sidebar so that it has a different display on the single post page, you can click on the site sidebar, click the options and then detach. 

And now that it's not attached it doesn't have a purple background or a purple outline so you know that that sidebar has been detached. You can edit that and add sidebar sections as needed and they will only show up on your blog or single post page. 

As you scroll down the page template you'll see the previous and next post options and you can customize that to your needs or delete it all together.This theme also comes with a pattern for the latest post if you prefer to show that instead. So let's swap that out. Here I'm going to click on the featured post section. And then I'm going to hit the plus button for the block inserter. 

Go to patterns. And go to posts. 

And scroll down until I find the latest posts list. 

So when I click that, that's going to be added to our post template. And then we can simply delete the popular posts. 

You'll get the warning that your page content won't display and that's okay because you'll still have your page content. This is just one particular section. And this is always going to display any time you're deleting a section that has post or page content inside. So now we have the latest posts instead. Then you'll scroll down and you'll see the comment section as well. Finally, at the bottom of the page template, we have this back to home call to action and that just gives readers an easy way to navigate back to the home page after they've read through the comments, left a comment, instead of just having a dead end.