Collection for singular pages

[jerome2710]

As discussed on Discord, we are trying to find a robust solution for singular pages. For example the homepage, a news overview or maybe even a contact page. There should be one entry, not none nor more than one. It should be dummy proof, not allowing a less technically skilled client to destroy the website by mistake.

For the homepage, the suggestion has been made to set the collection orderable and enable the "expects root page". But this allows any entry within the pages collection to become the homepage. And the homepage could be deleted. To prevent creation of multiple homepages, the suggestion was made to create a separate blueprint and enable the "hide" option. And that still leaves us with the other types of pages, like a news overview.

Or maybe we should use globals? But it feels strange to manage globals for which are actually pages. And it prevents us to link to them.

What is the standard way of creating singular pages?

Having experience with Craft CMS, it defines multiple types of collections, which they call sections; https://craftcms.com/docs/5.x/reference/element-types/entries.html#section-types. Singles are sections/collections with just one entry. I was hoping to find a similar solution in Statamic.

[jerome2710]

I see that there is also a similar idea raised a year ago in #1204.

Is there currently an existing alternative to make this concept work?

[afonic]

The correct way is to create blueprint for the one-off pages and enable the hidden option so other editors don't see them when creating an item.

To prevent it being deleted you can either:

• don't give access to that collection using Permissions.
• HIde the "Collections" menu item in the control panel and add menu links only to the collections you want your editors to handle.

The easier way would probably be 1, to create a "Single Pages" collection (or use the default Pages collection), have all such pages (each with its blueprint if needed) and then deny access to it for plain editors using permissions.