Easiest blogware to edit templates...

[Useless]

I'm looking for your opinions on which blog proggie makes it the easiest to bash the living shit out of the template system. I want to start a couple small blogs on my sites, but I want the blog to look as much like the mother site as possible. Whomever came up with WordPress' template scheme should be kicked in the balls. Great program, less than simple to hack after a few beers. I screwed with it for awhile, but could never get it to look quite the way I wanted and what I wanted was pretty fucking simple. Really, what I'd love is to be able to just php include some of the blog's junk onto a page on my site. Is that so much to ask?

Thanks in advance for any help you may offer.

[guestcam]

Originally Posted by Useless Warrior

.....Whomever came up with WordPress' template scheme should be kicked in the balls. Great program, less than simple to hack ..............never get it to look quite the way I wanted and what I wanted was pretty fucking simple.

Yeah my sentiments exactly! Although I was thinking more of a "moe slapping Curly" style of beating for Matt, the WP guy.

I've got a similar themed thread here in this forum. Seemed like bblog was the easier script to use for intergrating into your html, but had way too little plug ins.

good luck on your search for the truth.......

[Toby]

OK, just tossing ideas here, not really a blog person just something I've been thinking about in relation to a project I have in the planning stages.

If the blog software will create RSS feeds you could then insert that feed into your site instead of the whole blog?

[Agent]

Nice, a UW blog

I use Drupal ( http://drupal.org ). I've never used Wordpress but the templates are pretty easy to use. My blog's template is a modified version of one of the default ones. I just changed the logo, colors, and added and tweaked a few things here and there. A lot of the changes were through CSS style sheets and a HTML file. Only once did I have to go to a file I shouldn't have had to to make a simple change that wasnt in one of the standard style sheets.

[guestcam]

Originally Posted by Toby

...If the blog software will create RSS feeds you could then insert that feed into your site instead of the whole blog?

Well yes, but I THINK that a blogs RSS feed will be of the whole blog, no? But if you could get one or two topics or forums from a blog via RSS, then sounds like the right idea.....

[walrus]

UW, I use Bblog and personally think it is simple to edit the templates. Write your HTML, add the smarty tags where you want the blog crap to be and your done. Since you've already got the design...it would be just figuring out which tags you want where!

Oh and you could add RSS feeds right into the body of your post.

[walrus]

Originally Posted by guestcam

Well yes, but I THINK that a blogs RSS feed will be of the whole blog, no? But if you could get one or two topics or forums from a blog via RSS, then sounds like the right idea.....

I have Mambo on my home page (someday I'll have to actually do something with it) and it allows me to add RSS feeds pretty much in any manner I choose. I can take the newest ftopic to the newest 10 topics and show as much or as as many characters of each topic as I want from the feed. I can also select that on a feed by feed basis.

[Mr. Blue]

UW, take a day or two with Wordpress and you'll get the hang of it. I found some sweet little dummy tutorials for it that really helped me focus how to use it.

Also remember, you don't have to use the php to call the headers, side, and footer, you can make one template that includes all the elements of wordpress...it might not be recommended, lol, but I've done a few like that because I got rocks in my head and it seemed easier. All you would need then is the index.php and the style.css...here's some good easy tutorials though:

http://mattread.com/archives/2005/04...ss-is-not-php/

This article was the first step in getting me to understand it.

http://www.urbangiraffe.com/themes/guides

This is a complete tutorial if you want to build a blog from the ground up.

I just built a "custom" template for an erotic story blog I'm writing. I basically copied the default blog, made changes to the header, footer, and style sheet, and I have a custom look, pretty clean design, and it took me around 30 minutes.

[odysseus]

Hey Useless Warrior. I'm no guru, but I've skinned a few WP blogs from the ground up. If I can help you out at all, let me know. I owe ya one for helping with my crappy recips. If ya care to show a link to a page that you want the blog to look like, I'll tell ya if I can help you out or not.

[ronnie]

I use movable type and made it look just like my site, even hack it up for better SEO. And put php on the pages, no problem.

ronnie

[walrus]

Well it looks like Bblog dev crew is imploding so ignore any recomendations I made on it. I'm gonna ride it a couple of months but may be learning WordPress sometime very soon but fuck even one of their devs jumped to WP so it definately is looking not good.

[Useless]

Originally Posted by walrus

Well it looks like Bblog dev crew is imploding so ignore any recomendations I made on it. I'm gonna ride it a couple of months but may be learning WordPress sometime very soon but fuck even one of their devs jumped to WP so it definately is looking not good.

Oh sure, that's the one I downloaded and was looking at.

I'd prefer to use WP since it is so widely used, stable, and has so many plugins and what-what. I killed my first attempt at a while back. I'm not sure what even expect it to look like anymore. I'm good that way.

[Tart]

Wordpress 2.0 was just released and so far so good on an install I just did. The "themes" aren't too bad once you get the hang of it and the versitility is impressive IMHO.
Now hurry up so I can read your blog

[Agent]

I see WordPress 2 was released the other day:
http://wordpress.org/development/2005/12/wp2/#more-177

I'm partial to Drupal but I'll be giving it a look

[Agent]

Originally Posted by Tart

Wordpress 2.0 was just released and so far so good on an install I just did. The "themes" aren't too bad once you get the hang of it and the versitility is impressive IMHO.
Now hurry up so I can read your blog

You clicked 'Submit' faster than me

[Tart]

Originally Posted by Agent Deepshit

You clicked 'Submit' faster than me

Every once in a while, I get lucky

[Chop Smith]

Originally Posted by Useless Warrior

I'm looking for your opinions on which blog proggie makes it the easiest to bash the living shit out of the template system.

Have you ever heard of this fellow called Urb?

It is not active because the person pretending to be Chop is busy with Vegas but you can look at this - http://www.choponthelake.com/

[Useless]

Originally Posted by Chop Smith

Have you ever heard of this fellow called Urb?

It is not active because the person pretending to be Chop is busy with Vegas but you can look at this - http://www.choponthelake.com/

Urb? Urb who? Oh - Urb!

That's sweet, Chop. Me like.

[Cleo]

I only wanted to make a few small changes on my Movabletype Blog but it wasn't too bad. I did install the plug-in StyleCatcher which gives one click access to installing more templates and then changed a few of the image files. http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/styles/

I'm doing another Blog for someone else and we do want to modify the a lot more then what is available from their templates. This looks like it should work real well but I've only played with it a bit. http://styles.movalog.com/generator/generator.php

[walrus]

Originally Posted by Useless Warrior

Oh sure, that's the one I downloaded and was looking at.

I'd prefer to use WP since it is so widely used, stable, and has so many plugins and what-what. I killed my first attempt at a while back. I'm not sure what even expect it to look like anymore. I'm good that way.

Ya lucky for me, I've only got 4 blogs with 6 months worth of posts.

On the positive side, I'm told it's not too difficult to make the change over to WP, I only lose all my comments and since most of them are from stupid fuckers I don't think I'll be losing much! And all the time I spent building my own templates.