basic layout question

[avismalus]

Hi again! I have some more questions, this time regarding customizing the look of my journal.

I never used livejournal or anything similar so I'm extremely confused and can't really find any kind of guide that explains things without assuming you have prior knowledge of Livejournal. As you can see on my page, I've been messing around and managed to somewhat change my profile, but I still am confused and not really satisfied.

What I'm trying to achieve is making my layout look something like one of these:
https://secretare.dreamwidth.org/
https://catholicisms.dreamwidth.org/

Something extremely simple, basically I want my journal's front page just to be a navigation page. In the case of secretare, it seems like they basically have no theme, the only feature is the navigation post and the previous page button at the bottom. Also, when you click on their links, the pages it takes you to go back to being in the DW default theme for the comment page (if that makes sense?). I want to do something like this. catholicisms' is another example of the journal just being a single post with navigation links and no other features.

Sorry for these probably really basic questions... I'm not at all used to sites with this kind of setup and I can't understand layers versus styles versus coded post formats, etc...

Thanks to anyone who can help.

Comments

[raine]

It looks like what you see as a "no theme" is actually a theme. The default page setup is a theme or "journal style". If you go into your journal, you can customize your journal style. If you can't find it, go to https://www.dreamwidth.org/customize/ and see what comes up. Once there, about midway down the page on the right hand side, there should be a link to "Customize your theme" from which you can pick different themes.

You can go to: https://dreamwidthlayouts.dreamwidth.org to pick themes people have shared. I would also ask the people whose journals you have cited above to see if they would be willing to help you get a similar look.

Hope that helps!

[syntheid]

It looks like they both set it up so they have 1 entry per page, so https://www.dreamwidth.org/customize/options from here, set "Number of journal entries to show on the Recent Entries page" to 1. Then make a post you want as your front page and make it sticky (so that entry will always be what you see on your front page) and customize that entry with whatever text/images/links you want showing. I'm not sure if this option is available from the non-beta update page (and I'm not sure it's shown by default on the beta page, but if you're using the beta update page, you can go to Settings and tick the box to show the "Sticky" option, save it, and then when you make an entry you can tell it to be sticky there), but the other, non-intuitive way to do it is to grab the link of the post once it's posted, and then go to Account Settings and scroll down to "IDs or URLs of Sticky Entries" and paste the link in there, save and that should sticky it.

catholicisms customized the style so the default entry navigation is hidden with CSS, which is why you don't see the "Previous 1" link.

As for the theme, they are both using custom CSS over... some style, quite possibly Tabula Rasa since it's really simplistic. Which you'd find by going to the Journal Style selection page raine mentioned, and type "Tabula Rasa" into the search box, and I'd suggest using plain unless you like one of the starter color schemes already. Then if you go back to the first options link I mentioned, you can change colors/fonts, and/or just use the Custom CSS option to do things like hide the nav or make the boxes narrower if you're comfortable with that. You can also edit the modules and hide everything you don't want by unchecking them.

If you want the default DW site scheme to show up for your comments, that option's actually in Account Settings under "Entry Page Default" (if unchecked it'll default to the site scheme) and "Entry Pages: Shown to You" (your potential override for other people's comment pages when you're logged in).

You can safely ignore everything in Advanced Customization (all the layers/styles info there) to do what your examples have done.

Hope that helps? The system's definitely a little convoluted since it branched off LJ which wasn't that intuitive either, especially if you're used to modern UX design.