In this tutorial you will learn how to tweak your blog without any javascript to get a similar effect. On our homepage, all posts will show a short summary, followed by a "Read More" link. Clicking the "Read More"-link will bring up the post page with the full post text.

Step 1: Back up your template
Open the Layout|Edit HTML-tab on your Dashboard, and download the template as an XML-file to your harddisk. If anything goes wrong, upload it again and there will be no problem at all.

Step 2: Modify the template code
Scroll down and look for the following piece of code:

<div class='post-body entry-content'>
<data:post.body/>
<div style='clear: both;'/> <!-- clear for photos floats -->
</div>

This is the piece of template code that displays the post-body on the screen. We have to add a few lines of code here:

<div class='post-body entry-content'>
 <b:if cond='data:blog.homepageUrl == data:blog.url'>
   <style type='text/css'>.restofpost {display:none;}</style>
 </b:if>
 <data:post.body/>
 <b:if cond='data:post.link'>
   <a expr:href='data:post.link'>Read more...</a>
 <b:else/>
   <b:if cond='data:post.url'>
     <a expr:href='data:post.url'>Read more...</a>
   </b:if>
 </b:if>
 <div style='clear: both;'/> <!-- clear for photos floats -->
</div>

Step 3: Modify your post template
In your Blog Settings you can modify the post template. Change it to:

<div class="summary">Type summary here</div>
<div class="restofpost">Type rest of post here</div>

And furthermore...
The summary-div is not really necessary, as the code only hides the restofpost-div if we are on the homepage. If you want some other styling for the summary, add CSS-tags to the skin-part of your blog.

Read on »

In this Page Layout you can see where I have added the Menubar. The code of this section is highlighted in red:

<div id='header-wrapper'>
<b:section class='menubar' id='menubar' maxwidgets='1' showaddelement='yes'>
<b:widget id='LinkList2' locked='true' title='Menubar' type='LinkList'/>
</b:section>
<b:section class='header' id='header' maxwidgets='1' showaddelement='no'>
<b:widget id='Header1' locked='false' title='Beautiful Beta (Header)' type='Header'/>
</b:section>
</div>>

To the CSS-part of your template, add coding for the menubar-id:

#menubar h2 {display:none;}

#menubar ul {
list-style: none;
}
#menubar li {
float: left;
}

#menubar a:link, #menubar a:visited, #menubar a:hover {
padding: 5px;
display: block;
color: $headerTextColor;
}

#menubar a:hover {
background-color: $headerCornersColor;
}

Read on »