TEMPLATES FOR YOUR BLOG
Templates aren’t a new concept. You’ve probably used them yourself at some point. Templates are useful when you have a document that you reuse many times, changing only some items each time you use it. Most company letter¬head includes a logo or some kind of identifying mark and preprinted address at the top. When you use it, you add the address of the person you’re sending the letter to, a greeting, and the text of the actual letter. This is a template — some elements are always the same and never change, and some elements change every time the stationery is used.
Most Web sites are actually designed using templates, and using them is considered good form to provide a consistent user experience. As with CSS, blogs lend themselves very well to templates because the content is so consistent. ExpressionEngine includes templates for the following types of pages, organized into groups.
Weblog Templates
� A monthly archive page: Lists all the postings for a given month
� A category archive page: Lists all the postings for a given category
� A comments template: Formats the layout of comments readers leave on your site
� Several RSS feed templates: Sets up the content you want to include in your RSS feeds.
� A Trackback page: Formats the Trackback information for each blog entry
� A style sheet: Controls the layout and look of every element of your blog
� A home page: Lays out the page visitors see when they arrive
� A search page: Controls the layout of simple and advanced search forms
� A search results page: Formats the results returned from a search
� A search page style sheet: Controls the layout and look of the search page elements
You don’t have to use every template and you can add more, but these are good starting places for customizing to your blog. The best place to start is by editing the weblogcss template itself; most of the layout and design styles are controlled by this template. The next most important template to customize is the indextemplate, or the home page of your blog. Both of these are part of the weblog group of templates.