Newbie tutorial: Changing a WP template into a Blogs Organizer template
 

Here I show you step by step how to transform a wordpress template into a Blogs Organizer template.

Prepare your site in Blogs Organizer. Go to 'Regular Blogs > Add New' and fill out all the fields. At 'Blog Template' just choose anyone, it doesn't matter which one you take at this point, it will change anyway.

After setting everything up press 'ADD' at the bottom of the page. Before you continue working with Blogs Organizer choose a wordpress template of your choice. Wordpress templates look difficult because it uses include for the header, footer and so on, forget about that just copy the source code of the RENDERED wordpress template into your favorite text editor.

Now go back to Blogs Organizer and scroll down the page until you see the section '* Main Template:' Above the content part of this section you see all the tokens you can use in the blog template. Copy %%TITLE%% and place it in the title tag of the template you have in your text editor. Let's say (since we used the already rendered wordpress template) there is already a title like for example:

replace that with

What happens is that the token '%%TITLE%%' will be replaced with the title you entered for your blog in BO. Do the same with the tokens %%DESCRIPTION%%, %KEYWORDS%% for the meta description and meta keywords. Just replace the existing content with the tokens like you did with the title. Also place the tokens %%LINKTRADES,10%%, RECENTPOSTS,10%% (or %%RECENTPOSTS_LI,10%%), %%SITEMAP%% and %%BLOG_RSS%% into the sidebar(S) of the template in your text editor. Put it in the right format. If you don'T know what I'm talking about just place it there and look at the output once we're done, you'll see what this tokens are good for and will understand how to format them. If you wish to manage your linktrades with Blogs Organizer (I'd suggest you use Links Organizer for this) also place %%LINKTRADES,10%% into the sidebar. This token will be replaced with
another template, the 'Link Trades Template' which you find right above the 'Main Template'.

Now comes something some newbies might find complicated. You need to understand the 'loop' in blogs. Take a look at the content part in the template you have in your text editor. Most blog templates are mostly CSS templates and very often the content part of such a blog is within a 'content' div:

Now there will be some posts aready in this content part, we don't need them, we just need ONE post. You need to find out which DIV tags are for the posts. It may sound complicated but it's not. Each posts starts with the same div tag like for example <div class="entry">. So when you see something like

you see see where the post starts and where it ends. Now grab exactly one post and copy it into a new page in your text editor. Delete all the posts in the content section of your wordpress blog but not the content DIVs.

Let's take a look at a sample post:

First of all, delete everything we don't need like for example the trackback. Also place the tokens you find in the section 'Post Template:' in bo at the right spots in the post template in your text editor. For example

would be replace with

the footer part should look like this after changing it:

Notice that I deleted the comment part, simply because Blogs Organizer doesn't support comments at the moment. So we don't need that part and delete it. Also replace the whole content of the post in your editor with %%BODY%% and place all other tags at the correct position. After changing my sample post it should look like this:

There are some more tags you can use in your post template, if you want to know what they are good for simply place them in your post template and take a look at the output once the blog is ready!

Now copy this post template and past the code into the '* Post Template:' section of Blogs Organizer.

We deleted everything in the content section of the wordpress template before, remember? Now it's time to place another token right in the content section. In Blogs Organizer there is a token available in the main template section called %%POSTS%%. Put this in the content part of your wordpress template now, it should look similar to this:


copy the whole wordpress template from your editor and replace the existing content from '* Main Template:' in Blogs Organizer with it.

Click update at the bottom of the page.

Upload your blog files where you want your blog to appear.

Now you will notice that you blog will look fucked up, simply because we didn't upload the images and the css file of the wordpress template yet (in case it has images). So upload the images and the css file and make sure the paths in the template are correct...

This is it actually, this might look much for a newbie but once you actually understand it (this will happen if you just do it a couple of times) the whole procedure shouldn't take longer than 5 minutes...

thx for your attention :-)

don't know how many people post to lots of blogs...and if they've tried more than one prog. to do the job, like the one mentioned above... but I wonder what the thoughts would be on this one...

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thanks, good tutorial

Nice info you got there, thanks !