We have been debating how to achieve the goal to produce a homepage like first page of blogger. And there are a variety of solutions, trickes and hacks:
First trick - The Easy Peasy Way with Flaws
Reduce the number of posts to 1 (or very few) in the Layouts section of Blogger, the editing the Blog posts box. Then in order to have one post permanetly there, like a sticky thread or entry in a forum, just change the date stamp to some far away date in the future AFTER having already published the article. Nice but hhmmm.
Feasible without coding using just about any Blogger.com template, including the 3rd party ones
Second solution - Neat and tidy, though a little too constrained for the user
The next trick which we are using at the moment I am writing this is the "Featured" hack that Amanda's Nexus 5 is using. We have morphed Nexus 5 into BeeCMS and with a clever if then else hack, the posts simply disappear from the homepage, only the Feutured section (renamed "Welcome") can now bee seen when using this new template.
There is a catch though, the article uses a javascript, which "reads" out the post with such a label, but... all the layout options get parsed - just the text remains. For a "Welcome" message this may work fine if it weren't for another restriction: pictures need to be declared as well, ie, only one photo will be shown as a kind of preview.
So we though about removing most of the text and layout restriction restrictions, but it is still not enough.
Trying to filter the hompage posts with a label
This is now on our todo list. Most posts and Blogger forums / groups findings say, nay, forget it. Use a workaround. Then I struck gold. I haven't yet tested the hack, but it looks good,
We have another major re-design to do, we don't want to use the "read more" feature of post listings by deafult. Blogger has recently introduced the option to manually split the post using a button in the editor. And for a CMS-like website, this makes much more sense than listing summaries.
So we will reintroduce the normal Blogger code for the main posts, removing all the featured and post summary scripts... and then we'll try to test this hack by Blake Matheny. Or... maybe we'll find more hacks :-) Can't wait.
So as a reminder here are Blake's hacks:
First, search for the line that starts with <b:includable id='main' var='top'>. You are going to remove everything in that function between <b:loop values='data:posts' var='post'> and the closing tag with the following:
<b:if cond='data:blog.url == data:blog.homepageUrl'>
<b:if cond='data:post.labels'>
<b:loop values='data:post.labels' var='label'>
<b:if cond='data:label.name == "main"'>
<b:include data='post' name='printPosts'/>
</b:if>
</b:loop>
</b:if>
<b:else/>
<b:include data='post' name='printPosts'/>
</b:if>
The above change essentially says the following: if you are on the homepage, and a post has labels, and the post has the "main" label, then call printPosts. Or, if you are not on the homepage, call printPosts. Now search for the close tag of the main function (it looks like</b:includable>) and after it paste the following code:
<b:includable id='printPosts' var='post'>
<b:if cond='data:post.dateHeader'>
<h2 class='date-header'><data:post.dateHeader/></h2>
</b:if>
<b:include data='post' name='post'/>
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>
<b:include data='post' name='comments'/>
</b:if>
</b:includable
The above code is your printPosts function/method. It is identical to what you had before, it was just turned into a function to reduce code duplication. That's it. Now only posts with a "main" label will show up on the front page. [...] To filter out content, just change the (== "main") markup to something like (!= "nsfw").
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