Template Conversion (or close to it…)

The “modifying your templates” section of this document points to a few useful WP resources.

is my computer a glorified doorstop, or can I not view your wordpress page source? weird. I was going to try to help you out, but I can’t without seeing the source and css file. damn machine.

Regina,
It may be because of the security settings on my host – we recently moved server farms due to a pretty severe hacking, so they may have locked down view file contents quite a bit.
Is there something I can post or send you to help?

2fargon,
Yeah, I had seen a lot of those, and it’s not that I don’t understand CSS – well, I’m not ‘proficent’, but I’m not completely unaware – it’s the conversion between the two different formats.
Blogger has a completely different tag system than WordPress, from what I can see, and so it’s making things a bit difficult to find equivalents, etc.

I can view your blogger source. hmm. but anyway.. I’ll try to help you out just from looking at it.
I would basically copy your entire blogger template into a blank notepad (or whatever you use) file and just start replacing tags. don’t try to “modify” the wp template it came with. big pain in the butt, easier to start fresh. once you’ve replaced all the tags you can with their equivalents, see which blogger ones still need to be deleted and which wp ones need to be added. by the looks of it, there shouldn’t be many. just look in the wiki documention for any tag you need. once you have all your tags in place, it’s easy. all your css is pointing to the right things, so the tweaking will be minimal. simply stick your blogger css info into a css file, name it (I would recommend naming it something OTHER than the wp default, so you will have the original as a backup), and upload everything. them you’ll just have to fix minor errors that come up instead of tearing down other css and layout files.
hope that makes sense. ??

Actually, I disagree. It’s easier to work out the WP-style template design that you are looking for. You basically just need to rebuild the CSS to start with, to get the overall look down. Then you may need to reorder some tags, and will certainly need to modify the menu/sidebar to suit your desires. But a lot of the work is emulating your current blogger CSS in WP.
I’ve got a set of edits to a base index.php and wp-layout.css that seems to be getting pretty close, if you’d like to see it.
-d

This is as far as I’ve gotten:
https://www.chait.net/downloads/samplelayout.css
and
https://www.chait.net/downloads/samplecode.phps
samplecode is JUST the header and content blocks, to replace the equivalent in a raw index.php template.
-d

davidchait,
I want to thank you. You’ve really done a lot to point me on the right path to getting this all looking the way I want it to.
I’ve just got one more question at the moment – I’m sure I’ll have more, but this is pretty much it for right now – Is there a resource somewhere that documents each of the files that make up the “main” page – in otherwords, what each “included” file does, or the function?
I’m trying to change the sizing layout, etc. and I can’t seem to find the right files to work with.
TIA…
PG

The only files you should need to touch are index.php and wp-layout.css. I got well past 90% of the way to completion in maybe two hours of work (had to learn what the old layout was trying to do…). There’s nothing too special that needs custom coding really.
The index.php file is the core of the layout. Add items, remove items, do with it what you will. The markup/tags in index then allow you ‘full control’ in the CSS.
What sizing are you trying to change?
-d
CHAITGEAR