What's the preferred method of creating different page templates Basically, I want to give my articles and blog entries a different class on the body so I can style them independently.

I am given to understand that the best way to do this is with creating custom tpl files

I'm working in a custom built theme that is pretty much running just on a page.tpl.php and a stylesheet.

How would I do this easily in Drupal 7? I tried this method for drupal 6 but it didn't seem to work.
This should by there by default.

For example, the body classes on my test site look like this for a simplenews node:

&lt;body class="html not-front logged-in one-sidebar sidebar-first page-node page-node- page-node-90 node-type-simplenews toolbar toolbar-drawer i18n-en" &gt;


As you can see, there is node-type-simplenews, among many other things.

Those classes are defined in template_preprocess_html() and are using in html.tpl.php (not page.tpl.php, unless you've overriden that. If so, you need to duplicate the logic in that function for your page.tpl.php.