As I mentioned in the previous post I’m going to change how the site looks and works.
I want all new content to be uploaded as posts and I want these to appear on the home page.
I want them to have the title with a thin image that is relevant that links through to the full post. I don’t want the full post to be visible on the home page as that will make it cluttered and will make it annoying to scroll down to older posts.
I chose a new layout that looked good, had features I wanted such as a back to top button and appeared to have a homepage that worked the way I wanted. As seen in the image below an issue I had was that the posts were displayed in their entirety which isn’t what I want.
As I like the theme I want to find a way to collapse or minimise the posts on the homepage.
After some research I’ve found that it is possible to edit posts and pages to have a show-hide/expand-collapse option but this requires a 3rd party plugin which can’t be added to a site hosted by edublogs. More info in my Plugins post.
My only option is to find a theme that displays the posts as I desire.
I tried various different themes using the live preview that shows how they look with my content.
The theme below is called Codium Grid. I like it because each post is given an even amount of space on the home page with the title of the post, the category, the featured image and a short preview of the text with the option to read more. This will make it easy for users to get a quick overview of each post and navigate between them.
It also has a simple banner menu at the top of the page and widget menu along the left side which can give users the option to search all posts by a specific category, This is great as long as I really nail the categories.
Another theme I tired was Drop. I liked these for similar reasons as Codium Grid, it displays the posts in a clear and informative way. I wasn’t a fan of the menu being all on the left, it didn’t display very well on a mobile device. I also found when looking at the details of the theme that it hadn’t been updated in a number of years and that some aspects of it were no longer compatible.
