Understanding Structure and Layout

The new blogger blogs are simply terrific, I'm pretty excited about them. You can do so much more on blogger now! But the templates are totally different. Old bloggers will need to learn about the new structure and layout of these new bloggers before hoping to make any modes, even simple template mods.

I learned about the structure and layout of these new bloggers from Beautiful Beta. There is a wealth of information there to learn! I will simply recap the very basics here, and recommend that you go to Beautiful Beta for more in depth training and tutorials.

The biggest difference in the new bloggers is the introduction of widgets! Powerful way to design and configure your blog. You will find these in Templates>Layout.












This is what the default templates layout looks like. Pretty basic, yet extremely powerful. Even if you never learned how to modify or hack this, you could still have some really cool extended features because you can add as many new widgets as you like!

To modify your templates and create custom widgets, and 3 column templates from any existing default template, and add all sorts of cool enhancements to this already powerful set up, you need to understand the basic structure of the templates. All the default templates are the same in structure.

The layout has 4 sections,
Header, Main (with the Blog Posts), Sidebar and Footer.

Sounds simple enough, and it is, but unlike the old templates which were very forgiving, there can be no room for any errors in the new templates!

For a more in depth break down with the coding please refer to Beautiful Beta, I would only be repeating what has already been posted there! Hans does a excellent job of explaining every thing in greater detail with out loosing you along the way!

Blogger Out Of Beta!

The new blogger is really pretty cool. So cool in fact I decided to create a blog dedicated to it for reference to send my readers from my other sites. This post is just to get started so I can modify and configure it the way I want. Once I complete the design and config, you can expect to see more posts, and new templates, hacks and tips here!