Designing your archives

Buttondown is fairly opinionated about the best reading experience being friendly and minimal.

You can customize the design and functionality of your newsletter archives in Buttondown's archive settings.

Display a customizable message at the top of your archive pages. You can configure:

• Visibility: Choose who sees the announcement (everyone, free subscribers only, logged out visitors only, or paid subscribers only)
• Message: The text to display, with support for Markdown links
• Background color: Customize the bar's background color, or leave empty to use your newsletter's tint color

Enable dark mode support so your archives automatically match your reader's system preference for light or dark mode.

Customize the header and footer sections of your archive pages using Buttondown's rich text editor. You can add text, links, subscribe buttons, subscribe forms, and other elements.

Add custom links to your archive's navigation bar. This is useful for linking to external pages like your main website, social media profiles, or other resources.

Allow subscribers to search through your archive to find specific content.

Track page views on your archive to understand how readers engage with your content.

Buttondown comes with several built-in themes you can choose from:

• Classic template preview
• CSS for the Classic template

• Modern template preview
• CSS for the Modern theme

An Instagram-inspired grid theme that displays posts in a three-column layout, perfect for image-heavy newsletters. Named after photographer Diane Arbus.

• Arbus template preview
• CSS for the Arbus theme

A brutalist, nearly no-CSS theme that embraces browser defaults for maximum speed and simplicity. Renders in monospace with minimal styling. Named after Ada Lovelace.

• Lovelace template preview
• CSS for the Lovelace theme

You can view all available themes and their source code in the buttondown/themes repository.

You can use custom CSS to fully customize the styling of your newsletter archives.