Core Docs - Digital Publishing - Content Channel View Block

Rock Version: v19.0
Last Modified: 2026-02-17 3:05 PM

Now that you understand how to create content channels and items, the next step is adding them to your external website. The main block you will use to format channel content is the Content Channel View block. Adding this block to a page zone will allow you configure the settings listed below.

But Wait... There’s More

The settings above provide a ton of capabilities when adding dynamic data to a page. This block can also respond to specific query string parameters to alter its behavior. Let’s look at each of them:

Rock also supports passing in multiple values for Defined Value attributes that have 'Allow Multiple' enabled. In that case, the value you want in the query string parameter will be the GUID of the Defined Value you're looking for. Multiple values (i.e., multiple GUIDs) can be separated by a comma in the query string. This will return any items that have at least one of the provided values.

Showing a Single Item on a Page

Your Content Channel View block is great for showing all of the posts in a channel, but what about a block to show a single content item? You can use the Content Channel View block and use an ID or Title parameter, but we really want more SEO-friendly URLs. Enter the Content Channel Item View block, which brings you this and more.

This block gives you the option to "lock" it to a specific channel so that you can have a sermon series called "Moneywise" and a blog post titled "Moneywise" without having to worry about your pages getting confused about which item to show. To limit its search to a single channel, simply specify the Content Channel in the top input.

The Lava Template is the template which will be used to determine what shows up on the page. Initially, this will simply show the title of the item and the content below, but you can get really detailed in specifying how this page will be laid out. Using the Item object, you can access the properties and attributes of your content item for display on the page and even provide links to other pages.

In the Visitor Settings section, you can choose whether an interaction is logged every time someone views an item on a page with this block. You can also specify a Workflow Type that should be launched whenever this block is used to show an item. The workflow will be passed a Person entity which you can use to store the person who viewed the page (if they're logged in). If your workflow has a Content Channel Item attribute with a key of ContentChannelItem, that attribute will be automatically filled in as well. You can use that attribute to discover which item they viewed, and optionally perform different actions based on that information.

The Social Media Settings section will let you link any item attributes you added to the channel to special meta tags on the page. For instance, if your blog post has an image they've provided in an attribute, you might want that image to be shown on the preview that appears in Facebook when someone shares your post there. But you might want to ask your post author to provide a different image for Facebook than the image for Twitter, so you can use these fields to specify which attribute will be used for each social network.

Finally, in Advanced Settings, you can specify what this block calls a slug, if you use that parameter in the URL. For example, if you wanted to provide a URL with ?sermon=MoneyWise at the end instead of ?slug=MoneyWise, you could type "sermon" into this box, and it would look for an item with a slug matching the "sermon" parameter in the URL. (Of course, using parameters like this would break the SEO friendliness that this block was designed for, so it would be an unusual case that you would want to put anything in this field). Usually, you'll just want to access the page using an address like "/sermon/MoneyWise" which would match a Page Route of sermon/{slug}.

You can also specify whether the output and the item content itself is cached to speed up page loads. You can also allow the item being viewed to set the page title so that your users aren't seeing a generic title like "Our Sermons" when they load a page that is showing a sermon called "Our Cloud of Witnesses".

Tips and Tricks

Below are some tips and tricks to help you maximize your usage of dynamic data: