kadyellebee

What did I change from how it used to look? The background is a little different and the content of the weblog is centered now. The sidebar areas are a bit different, too. The fonts look much nicer to me than the last revision. And things that are different from the default template? I put my rollover list for the top in the area where the Weblog Description usually sits. And added a 3rd column by adding a gamma area after the beta. Since a 3 column layout is expected to be sidebar, content, sidebar, I added some definitions to get around that. All of that meant tweaking not only 2 blogs worth of designs (kadyellebee and kdlb-links), but the magpie index as well. But it wasn’t too bad, actually. Once I got my header and background tweaked and into their place here, I was on the home stretch.

So what next? I think I got all of the major pages fixed up. I’d *love* to have switched over to dynamic templates for my Individual Archives while doing this, but I really can’t live without my MTMacros plugin, and I didn’t have time to try and figure out how to port it to PHP or write my own (E said we probably could do that, given some time). So static pages it is. However, all of my pages DO build now, and before, they were timing out, so the combo of MT3.2 being way cooler and going back to more basic templates without as many plugins probably helped

I’ll probably try to add Skins back in at some point now that I have a nice standard structure to apply them to. The skins are still there, there’s just only one to choose from. One challenge (thank you to the MT forums search for helping me figure it out!) was that the new default Individual Archive template uses an onload statement in the body, and all of skin structure I had been using had the body tag in the header. So I had to do some php trickery to set a variable if it was an Individual Archive page and then add that code in only in the skin when the variable was set. Phew, I thought I was gonna have to restructure how I did skins!

I think that I could do a similar design on kdlb-pad without much tweaking, but I kinda like the difference between them, Lilia’s TypePad design really is happy to me after I did some Custom CSS tweaks there too.

I should talk too about how much I like MT3.2, but that’ll have to be another post.

Design babble. I wonder if you all missed this or if I’m just silly? Hee hee