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Journeys

Status — In build

The Journey models and CMS are live, so editors can add journeys. Readers can open one: journey detail returns the course, its chapters and the reader's progress, in the Journeys API guide. Two carousels lead to it — the Home Featured Journeys list, an editor's hand-picked set of up to 5, and a theme's journeys carousel, every journey whose primary theme is that one. Recording a completed chapter and collecting the emblem come next. The Journeys & Home design holds the full design.

A Journey is a guided course through Lewis's work: an editor-curated, ordered set of pieces built around one central question, so a reader finds them in a considered order instead of searching.

The shape

A Journey is a list of chapters. A chapter is one piece — one Passage, Writing or Article — wrapped in the editorial framing that turns it into a step of the course.

Journey  "Becoming Your True Self"
  └── Chapter 1  "The Masks We Wear"     → one Passage
  └── Chapter 2  "Chasing the wrong thing" → one Passage
  └── …

A chapter is not a container of several readings. It holds one piece plus the words around it: the question that opens it, an optional pause, an optional practice, and the line shown when the reader reaches the end.

The reader moves through a chapter as a short arc — opening question, the editor's lead-in a page at a time, the piece itself, what it means, a pause, a reflection they can skip, then a glimpse of the journey's emblem. Almost all of the reading comes from the piece the chapter points at; the chapter supplies the connective tissue around it.

What belongs to what

Where it lives Why
The text itself, what it means, the reflection question, the themes the piece (Passage / Writing / Article) A piece is complete on its own and is read outside journeys too
The opening question, the intro pages, pause, practice, end-of-chapter line the chapter Written for this position in this journey
The central question, the pitch, the colour, the emblem the journey Shared by every chapter

Because the reflection question and the themes belong to the piece, a piece read inside a journey and the same piece read on its own ask the reader the same thing and sit in the same worlds. A chapter is tagged once, on the piece — never twice.

A few rules worth knowing

  • A chapter must point at exactly one piece — a Passage, a Writing, or an Article, never two.
  • Order is set by the editor, by dragging chapters into place. Chapter numbers are worked out from that order when the app asks for them; they are never typed in.
  • Everything must be published before the journey can be. Publishing a journey with a chapter whose piece is still a draft is refused, and the CMS names the chapters holding it up.
  • A piece in a live journey cannot be unpublished. The CMS refuses it and tells you to unpublish the journey first, or point that chapter at another piece. A live journey therefore never loses a chapter or renumbers the rest, which matters because a reader's progress is saved against particular chapters and renumbering would strand it.