the theme normally displays the description. If I get it right this is styled with article-subtitle
I deleted your base-of.html
and changed the summary code you added to layouts\partials\article-list\default.html
<section class="article-subtitle">
{{ .Summary }}
{{ if .Truncated }}
<a href="{{ .RelPermalink }}">Read more...</a>
{{ end }}
</section>
seems to work - looks like the css only targets classes and not tags. they use <div> instead of <section>
if yoe need more adjustments on that display, you could create a customized class for example article-summary based on the substitle one and use that for the summary section.
for the other two points …
- could you point us in the direction where the space is (marked screenshot) and
- you adapted the image code for the list aswell → does it center in the original code?