Theme development: can I have multiple data sources in one template?

Themes
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Hi, I’m just getting my feet wet with handlebars and ghost theme development.

I’ve just read through the Routing section of the docs to get an idea for different ways to populate a page with data, but I have a problem: I would like to create a front page that sources its content from multiple channels instead of just one. I may have overlooked this but I’m not sure this is even possible?

To illustrate, what I’m trying to achieve is the following:

  • A collage of article thumbnails (let’s say “featured”, posts, but maybe just based on a hidden tag instead)
  • Below, some photo posts (identified / filtered by a hidden tag)
  • Below, the X most recent posts (blog-style, i.e. just all posts filtered by descending date)

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Is this possible with handlebars/ghost? I assume this should be a job for channels (?) but I have not seen multiple channels being used in a single template file or routing definition, so I’m not sure how to implement this. If this will not work, what are possible workarounds to achieve a page composition like this?
I have a background in WordPress development (which I’d like to leave behind), in that case I’d have multiple get_posts(...) calls with different filter criteria set to grab those lists of posts…

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Yes! This would be a job for the {{#get}} helper (which is named after get_posts() )

Channels and routes are for when you want to build custom streams of content with pagination, for example how DESK magazine structures different Series:

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Thanks John, awesome! That is exactly what I meant.

This brings me to my next, tangential question: When I’m looping over a context, or in a {{#get}} for that matter, is {{#foreach}} the only way to loop over the posts, or is there a way to grab the “next” post from the iterator?

My use case is the aforementioned collage of featured articles, which looks like this in HTML:

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It would be much easier to{{#get}} 5 featured posts and then manually pulling their data in the right area, rather than looping over them end doing weird DOM writing with {{#has number="1"}} switch cases. That does seem to be possible though, so if {{#foreach}} is the only way to look, I can make do with it.