Title-only Index

I’m in the process of moving a blog over to write.as and I’d love to change my index page to only display the post titles (and maybe dates as well). As far as I can tell, the only way to do that today is by using some custom CSS to display: none; the post content under the #collection, but that’s pretty inefficient since the full post body is still being sent to the browser.

Would the title-only index potentially work as a new Display Format? Or possibly as a modifier on the existing format types?

Thanks for the input – this is good to know. For right now, yes the best way to do this would be with CSS.

If anything, this could work as a modifier on existing Display Formats, so people can still change the order of the posts. But it needs a little more thought / discussion for a few reasons:

  • Some posts might not have titles (what to display instead? e.g. the date – but that’ll only work with the Blog display format)
  • People will also probably want to customize where the date shows up (e.g. on the same line as the title vs. below) when using the Blog format

Lastly, product design-wise, I think this belongs in a bigger #development discussion about supporting themes. I don’t know the answer today, but this might be something that is more suited for a larger themes system instead of built as a core option on the platform. Open to ideas on that from anyone.

One thing to consider is the use of <!--more--> : similar to how some other platforms do it, you can set where a “read more…” link appears by putting that someplace in the post.