Wednesday, February 27, 2013

The Simplest Possible Template

I like to start from the very beginning. So, I wanted to start my template experimentation with a very, very basic template. Following is what I started with.



I was able to copy-and-paste this directly into Notepad++, save as an XML file, and upload to Blogger using the Backup / Restore button (upper right hand corner on the Template page) and it worked for me.

I think this bare-bones template is helpful because it lets you see the basic structure of a Blogger template:
  • There is an HTML element that contains two child elements - <head> and <body>. The opening HTML tag has a series of required attributes. You should just copy-and-paste these directly. It's not very important to know exactly what these are. 
  • The <head> element contains two elements - a <meta> element and a <b:skin> element. You won't have to worry about the <meta> element for a while. The <b:skin> element is where variables and CSS styling will eventually go - but I'll get into that in another post. 
  • The <body> element has one child - <b:section>. Every Blogger template MUST have at least one <b:section> element.
  • The <section> element has one child - <b:widget>. The widget, in this case, is a Blog widget (as indicated by type='Blog').
And with that, we have a very simple Blogger template. 

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