Question

I’m working on a wordpress that has, among other things, a Front Page and a Post Page for showing news.

From what I understand, the template that the Post Page uses, is the index.php, but the index.php is also used by other pages.

The thing is that I want to create a special page for post, with a header that says news, etc., but I don’t want other pages to use that template.
Is there a way to create an alternative index.php (index_news.php) that is only used to show posts?

That way I can use index_news.php for the post and index.php for everything else.

Thanks

EDIT //////////

My first option was to create a new page-template (news.php) with the loop inside, and then, in the the wordpress options, targeted the post to that new page (news.php).

But when I do that, it loads the index.php not the news.php template. Maybe is something wrong with the loop. Here is the loop I’m using:

<!-- Start the Loop. -->

<div class="post">
    <!-- Display the Title as a link to the Post's permalink. -->
    <h2><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>

     <!-- Display the date (November 16th, 2009 format) and a link to other posts by this posts author. -->
     <small><?php the_time('F jS, Y') ?> by <?php the_author_posts_link() ?></small>

     <!-- Display the Post's content in a div box. -->
     <div class="entry">
       <?php the_content(); ?>
     </div>

     <!-- Display a comma separated list of the Post's Categories. -->
     <p class="postmetadata">Posted in <?php the_category(', '); ?></p>
</div> <!-- closes the first div box -->

 <!-- Stop The Loop (but note the "else:" - see next line). -->
 <?php endwhile; else: ?>

 <!-- The very first "if" tested to see if there were any Posts to -->
 <!-- display.  This "else" part tells what do if there weren't any. -->
 <p>Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.</p>

 <!-- REALLY stop The Loop. -->

Answer 1

single.php – is for one post view, but if You wolud like to modify blog index, than you could also create a custom template (page-news.php) with a header that allows it to be separated as page template:

<?php
/*
 * Template Name: News Page
 * @package WordPress
 */
?>

and then use loop inside of it.
But for this case what I think is even better, You can modify header.php and use wordpress conditional tags such as:
is_front_page(), is_page() or any that will work for You: http://codex.wordpress.org/Conditional_Tags

There are many ways to do same ;).