I updated the backend of this site months ago when MT 4 was released, but never took advantage of the new templates. This site dates back to 2005 and so my templates were heavily customised. The new templates for MT4 were completely different and the job of updating was just too daunting at the time.
I've been using the new templates on a site where I talk about MT4 called Babble On, and it's been a steep learning curve with widgets and modules and things I'd never even heard of before. The MT documentation explains what modules and widgets are as follows:
Template modules are little snippets, sections of templates that you can create and then re-use in your other templates. If you've ever used "includes" in a website to re-use parts of a page like headers, footers, or navigation, then template modules work the same way. These are handy for creating parts of web pages that you want to keep consistent across your site.
Widgets are like Template Modules, in that they're little bits of a web page that you can re-use, but you can also manage them with MT's Widget Manager, a feature that lets you rearrange parts of your page just by dragging Widgets around with your mouse.
Now, a year later, I felt confident enough to finally do it, but not without some trepidation. The first task was to back everything up so if I stuffed up, I had something to fall back on. I created a new blog, with new templates, and imported all the entries from here. So many things were different, even the way that MT named each entry with a hyphen instead of the underscore. I applied one of the default minimalist templates so that when I set about re-doing the CSS, there wouldn't be that many major changes.
I added a fluid style, instead of using the default 940 wide layout; added the tabbed navigation, set up my background and header image and link colours. It was a slow process, because I did each thing separately to see how it would look before moving on to the next thing.
I created widgets for all the old sidebar code and created a couple of widget sets. These make life so much easier if I decide later to add or remove items. You might also notice a few new plugins I've added: Action Streams, Joomsayer and Sociotags. They all add a little more personalisation to the whole page.
I thought about a complete change for the look of the site but in the end decided that this site is "mine" and I wanted to keep it that way. It's a style that visitors are used to and is not so different to the old style. Check out the Quotes tab to compare the two. Since I've integrated the quotes blog and my photo gallery into this site it seemed only sensible at this stage to keep as close a look to the old style as possible. So after 5 days of coding and refreshing pages and rebuilds, I think I'm finally there and can concentrate on adding something to read rather than something to look at.
Hope you like it...
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