Wordpress Theme for Blogger - Part 3 (Final)

The last steps in building the Wordpress theme are mostly minor tweaks. There will be some template CSS changes, but, these will be some simple steps. What you see at the left is my completed Tw***yTe* theme for Blogger. If you click on the picture you'll see the template in action!

One thing to note - I cannot give this template away since Simple is copyrighted by Blogger and the artist who created it. You'll have to do the modifications yourself as noted in Part 1 and Part 2. If you're in the market to create Blogger templates then don't use an existing copyrighted one to sell online. You'll have to start from scratch or buy a template. However, you can always try to contact a template owner to see if they'll allow you to customize and resell an existing one.

Adding the Blogger Tab Menu

Ok, the next step is to enable the Blogger tabs just under the banner we added. The good news is that these will automatically be enabled in the right position for the Wordpress theme look-and-feel.

Go back into the Blogger main menu and choose 'Pages' to turn on the page tabs on the site. Just pick the dropdown called 'Show pages as' to select 'Top tabs' like this:

This will turn on the Pages tabs at the bottom of the banner image. Let's add another page to make sure the tab menu works well. Choose the 'New page' dropdown and select 'Blank page':

Once selected you'll see the new page dialog box - simply enter a title at the top ('About' in this case) and some random page text. Press 'Publish' to add the new page:

Be sure to save the new pages by pressing the 'Save arrangement' button on the upper right:

On the template now you should see the visible tabs with both the 'Home' and 'About' tabs like this:

With the tabs now visible the next step is to modify the fonts and colors to match our theme. Go back into the Blogger Template Designer as we did before to modify some of the Advanced settings.

Choose 'Advanced' / 'Tabs Text' to change the tab menu font to 'Arial' and size to '13px'. Be sure to set the font 'Text Color' to '#999999' and 'Selected Color' to '#ffffff':

Don't save just yet. Go ahead and change the 'Tabs Background' as well so that the 'Background Color' is '#000000' and the 'Selected Color' is '#333333':

If you noticed there's still a white border around the tabs - this change is located in the 'Accents' section. Change the 'Tabs Border Color' to '#000000':

Now we'll make a few tweaks to the CSS code to fix a couple of small things that can't be configured from the menus. If you've noticed there's still a small, white line between the tabs. Also, there's a dotted line at the bottom of the template just above the footer.  Finally, I noticed that I had made a mistake in Part 1 of this series on setting the Blog post title link colors to black. Its seems that for this template all link colors followed the same pattern making even links within posts the color black.

So, let's fix all three things in the 'Add CSS' section. WAIT!! The other CSS code we added earlier is missing! I've seen this before in Blogger and think it is a bug of some sort. (Note, though, the CSS code we added in the earlier parts is still in the template - just not visible. You might find it different - your CSS code may show up). Given that, just add the following code to your template anyway to set the .footer-outer, .tabs-inner and h3 settings (h3 tags the Post titles):

Now to fix the link colors for the entire template we'll have to go back undo what we did in Part 1. Let's change the link colors back to a standard blue and purple. Go to 'Advanced' / 'Links' and set the 'Link Color' to '#3333ee', the 'Visited Color' to '#8800aa' and the 'Hover Color' to '#ee3333':

After all of that work be sure to apply your changes now:

Completing the Theme Sidebar

At last, we're at the last steps! The final things to do are to add the Search box and alter the Archives look. First, just go to the Blogger main menu and select the 'Layout' to press the 'Edit' link on the 'Blog Archive' side bar like this:

The archives dialog box should appear. Let's configure a few settings to make it more like the Wordpress Theme. Set the 'Title' to 'Archives', the 'Style' to 'Flat List', and the 'Date Format' to month / year. Once done go ahead and press the 'Save' button:

That's it for the Archives section. Now stay in the 'Layout' menu - just above the Archives sidebar item you should see 'Add a Gadget' link. Click on that to open the Gadget list. Scroll through the list to find the 'Search Box' gadget  and press the '+' button as shown to add the Search box:

You should now see it in your layout sidebar just about the Archives. Go ahead and click on the 'Edit' link within the layout to open the Search Box configuration. If you noticed on the theme, there is no title for the search. In Blogger you have to have a title - however, you can enter the HTML equivalent of a space ' ' in the 'Title' box. Uncheck 'The Web' search setting and scroll down to press the 'Save' button (you can't see it in the picture -- follow the arrow down):

Guess what!!?!  You are done! The Wordpress theme is ready to go!

I hope you learned how to modify your templates enough to continue to extend or create your own in the future. Here's the final result:

Posted By my pwiki4:40 PM

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How to Backup Your Blogger Template

I originally had this section within another post but felt it warranted a separate post for anyone's reference. It is always a good practice to backup your templates just in case something goes awry. Before you do any modifications to a Blogger template be sure to either practice these changes in a test blog or backup your template to disk before starting. This is critical!! Modifying a template is prone to errors and may disable your blog. If you haven't done this before it is very easy. Please note - this only backs-up your template, not your posts! Posts are exported in the Settings/Other/Export Blog section.

Backing Up Your Blogger Template

Just go into the Blogger main menu for your specific blog and choose the 'Template' option. Up in the far right corner is the 'Backup/Restore' option for your template. Just click on that to start the backup process:

A pop-up dialog will appear with the Backup / Restore options with the button to 'Download full template' like this:

The template is just an XML file - you'll see a long, odd name for it when you press the button such as this one:

Just choose a convenient location on your hard drive by selecting 'Save File' so that you can retrieve it later if necessary.

Restoring Your Blogger Template

If you want to restore a template, just follow the same steps but choose the 'Browse' option in the window below to find your Blogger template XML file:

The file on the disk should look something like this:

You can see that I've selected it - just double-click the file to get it into the file box:

Hit the 'Upload' button to restore - you should be good to go! Remember, you can use the Restore option to import templates as well - more on that in future posts.

Posted By my pwiki7:22 PM

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Build a Basic Wordpress Theme for Blogger - Part 2

After completing Part 1 of this tutorial, I see that this part is going to be the trickiest such that I think I'll just focus this post on adding the top image and repositioning the title and description. As much as I wanted to not touch the template directly, I discovered that we're going to have to make one change deep within the Blogger Simple template.

Before we start be sure to either practice these changes in a test blog or backup your template before starting. This is critical!! Be sure to read my post How to Backup Your Blogger Template to learn how to do this.

Adding a Banner Image to the Wordpress Theme

Ok, from Part 1 we were ready to add the banner across the top of the template. I'm not going to go into a deep tutorial on how to create and format a banner image other than to say you need a .jpg (JPEG) or .png (Portable Network Graphic) image that is formatted to approximately 940x165 pixels ready to go. If you don't know how to do this check out the video tutorial called How to Make Blog Headers, or, just do a search for creating a Blogger or Wordpress header image in Google.

To add a banner in Blogger is simple - just access your template's layout using the main menu 'Layout' selection and press the 'Edit' link in the 'Header' section like this:

Once you're in the edit dialog, select your banner image from wherever you saved it on your hard drive using the 'Browse' button. Be sure the 'Shrink to fit' option is not selected:

Things are going to look a bit odd at this point - the first reason is that your banner may not be exactly 940 pixels wide - the second reason is that the Blogger title and description are located within the image. Don't worry, we'll adjust the template width and title later. However, we need to customize the CSS to reduce the padding around the template (which I highlighted below with the red arrows).  Here's what the template looks like so far:

Jump back into the Blogger Template Designer ('Advanced' menu item - review Part 1's post to find it) from your main menu to add some custom CSS code like we did yesterday. We want to set the blog's inner padding ('.content-inner') to about 20 pixels like this:

The left side of your blog should look proportionally good - however, the right side might be off due to the blog width. Stay in the Blogger Template Designer and select the 'Adjust widths' option to alter the full width of the 'Entire Blog' so that the right side margin/padding looks aligned with the left (note that I also adjusted the sidebar width a bit:

At this point your template should have a good banner image with the appropriate widths set.

Adjusting the Blogger Template HTML Code

Now comes the hard part. As you noticed earlier the blog's title and description fields are now located within the image itself. We need to move these above banner. I thought some simple CSS code might do it - but, I haven't found a good way yet. So, we're going to move some of the template's HTML around a bit and add a couple of CSS formatting commands.

First let's jump into the template's HTML code. Go back to the blog main menu and choose 'Template' and 'Edit HTML' button:

Note that you'll get the warning message that tampering with the template may cause you problems in the future. Our changes will be small so don't worry - go ahead and press 'Proceed':

Before you do anything click on the checkbox named 'Expand Widget Templates' as shown below. You are going to be searching for the HTML code where the banner is actually rendered.

In the HTML code, do a search from your browser using the Crtl-F key to find the following string "div expr:style='"background-image". You should be able to find it - if not, try manually searching for it - you should find it about one third of the way down the template:

Note that I've underlined two parts - the title and description fields that will need to be modified. This first thing I want you to do is to delete the sections that I've highlighted below - but DON'T save yet:

Once you've deleted these four lines be sure to press the 'Preview' button (two images above) to make sure the template is not messed up. You should see the blog without either the title or description within the image. If you do get an error, just go back and press 'Close' without saving the template - that way your mistake won't be saved.  Here is the code with the sections removed:

If the preview worked ok, then the next step is to add the following code to the template just about the search text we found - here is the code we want to add:

<div class='customtitle'>
    <h1 class='title' style='background: transparent; border-width: 0px'>
        <b:include name='title'/>
    </h1>
    <span class='customdescription'><data:description/></span>
</div>

Find the search string again "div expr:style='&quot;background-image" that is just above the sections we removed. We're going to paste the code just above this line like so:

Press the Preview button to make sure the code works - here's what you should see!

Now the title and description are positioned out of the image boundary. The last step for this part is to position those elements correctly using some CSS code in the Blogger Template Designer ('Advanced' menu item) again. Just add the CSS code in the image to position the title and description correctly. You might have to tweak the description left distance a bit:

A bit of work - but, take a look at the template now - it's really coming together:

Next up in Part 3, the final settings for the sidebar and highlighting modifications. Enjoy!

Posted By my pwiki7:27 PM

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Build a Basic Wordpress Theme in Blogger - Part 1

Everyone loves Wordpress themes - am I right? Well, before we get started I'm going to tell you a story about my first attempt at building a Wordpress theme in Blogger before Google came along a auto-deleted my work. Auto-deleted??

The goal of this tutorial is to build and modify an existing standard Blogger layout to look just like the Wordpress Tw****Te* theme. (The reason I did not actually add the words here is because Google thinks that particular keyword is somehow asscociated with spam). I started this mini project by naming my Blogger blogspot example tw****te*.blogspot.com. As I started working with it I suddenly received an error. Looking back at my blog listings, that particular one had been deleted by Google!!

I'm not sure of the rationale here but I'm guessing that Google feels that name is a means to drive a spam site. I wasn't too far into it yet so it really wasn't much of a loss - but I must admit I was a bit shock by the sheer bravado of Google to assume that I was spamming the system. So, it this tutorial I"ll be using more, 'a-hem', generic words. You'll know what I mean when you see the actual template in action.

Basic Theme Configuration in Blogger

Starting from scratch, the easiest way to build this theme is to start with Blogger's 'Simple' template. Here's the visual of my first step - just highlight the theme in the Template window:

This template works well for a look-a-like Wordpress theme since it is easy to manipulate. However, it does have a few quirks that force you to use some simple, custom CSS code. I'll get to that later.

Even though we chose the Simple template, go back into the Template designer to change the Simple template color scheme to the more black and white look (if you're not sure how to get to the template designer, take a look at my post called How to Add a Background Image to Blogger - it shows how to get there). Just choose the Simple template on the far right (be sure to hit the 'Apply to Blog' button on the far upper right):

The next steps are to adjust your template's background, colors, links, and text sizings. Stay or go back into the template designer for now. We're going to set a group of values together. Let's start with the main body text size and color. In the 'Advanced / Page Text' settings, change the font to Georgia, size to 14.7px (enter it in by hand), and the text color to #333333 like this:

Next, set the 'Outer Background' to #eeeeee (just type it in with the # symbol) and leave the 'Main Background' to its default value:

Now we'll set the 'Links' colors to custom values (Note: there is an error here that is fixed in Part 3 - you can go ahead and alter the Links colors but you'll have to fix them later). Don't worry about the sidebar colors just yet - this will alter all of the base (#191919), hover (#191919), and visited (#bb2188) colors for both Posts and Sidebar links:

The actual 'Blog Title' font and size will have to be modified next. Set the font to 'Arial', the style to Bold (just click on the 'B'), the size to 20px and the Title Color to (#191919):

Next, set the 'Post Title' font to Arial and the style to Bold (again, just click on the 'B') with a 20px height like this:

If you noticed on the Simple template the 'Date Header' is reversed by default with the text white and the associated background grey. Let's reverse that by setting the text color to grey (#666666) and background to white (#ffffff). We'll alter the style in the next post:

Congrats! You've completed configuring all of the core base settings. Be sure to hit the 'Apply to Blog' button now to save your work like this:

As you can probably see by now, the template is starting to look much like the Wordpress theme above! However, let's do a few final steps to get a bit closer.

Customizing the Theme Description

One oddity in this particular template is a missing configuration to modify the blog's description text. First thing to do is add a blog description if you haven't yet by going back to the main menu and choosing 'Settings' like this:

Go ahead and enter your description by clicking on the 'Edit' link as shown above. I entered 'Just another Blogspot blog' for mine and save the setting. You should now see the description under the title of the template.

Our last step for Part 1 is to add a couple of simple CSS template changes. First, we'll add a CSS change that places a small margin at the top and bottom of the template to make it look more like the Wordpress theme. And, we'll also add some code to modify the font characteristics of the description.

Go back into the Template designer again and choose the 'Advanced' / 'Add CSS' section. Add the following code to your template like this:

At the top you see the .content-outer section change which will add a margin at the top and bottom of your blog. Now, if you're advanced enough to know how to hide the standard Blogger navigation bar at the top, you don't need to add the 'margin-top:20px;' code (NOTE: UPDATE - I noticed a week later that this didn't work on Internet Explorer 8 - change margin-top and margin-bottom to padding-top and padding-bottom instead -- so, you should have 'padding-top:20px;' and 'padding-bottom:40px;'. That works fine!). When the nav bar is hidden you get automatic padding. The second section is to modify the font of the blog's description in the '.Header .description' section. Just add both of the font declarations I have in the picture. Be sure to hit 'Apply to Blog' to save the changes.

This ends Part 1 - as you can see, we're getting close to the theme:

Next up in Part 2 - some deeper modifications to add the top image, add a Page menu, and altering the sidebar. If you're ambitious enough, maybe you can try to do these yourself.

Posted By my pwiki1:21 PM

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