I've been spending time researching Roller and slowly figuring out how to tweak the template. I'm constantly playing around with the style sheet, and seeing how much I can pull off there. So far it's been pretty simple - just tweaking values here and there. Initially the template used many styles that simply weren't defined, so it was a matter of adding them to the style sheet.

After reading gconf's blog, I was inspired to figure out how to add the category next to the entry title. Looking over Roller's macro documentation, I couldn't find the string I wanted. I was hoping there was a variation of showWeblogCategoryChooser, which is called in the beginning of the template:

<div id="Content">
<center>
<img src="http://blogs.sun.com/roller/resources/frosty/frostyland.title.v2.jpg"
width="435" height="120" border="0">
<p class="descrip">#showWebsiteDescription()</p>
#showWeblogCategoryChooser()<br>
</center>
#showWeblogEntries("_day" 15)
<hr />
#showReferers( 40 25 )
</div>

... but no such luck. Then I remembered reading that it is possible to subscribe to a blog's RSS feeds by category - so there had to be way then, right?. So off to the Roller Macro Reference to take a peek at the the rss velocimacro. And there it was in the template source:

<category>$entry.category.name</category>

So off to plug that in to my _day template file. And while I was at it, I made some other tweaks (spacing and alignment):

#foreach( $entry in $entries )
<a name="$entry.anchor" id="$entry.anchor"></a>
<b>$entry.title</b>
<span class="category"> ... <i>in</i> $entry.category.name</span>
$entry.text
<p align="right">
#showCommentsPageLink( $entry ) :
#showEntryPermalink( $entry ) :
<span class="dateStamp">($entry.pubTime)</span>
</p>
#end

I'm pleased with the results. It's not that hard, just takes a bit of persistence.

Next up is more style sheet tweaks and additions of classes, and to fix one of my biggest peaves, the <ul> tag. If you're a CSS hacker, you probably know about A List Apart. There's a great article about lists and how to customize the layout and appearance. You'd be surprised at what you can do with <ul>.

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Published: (2005-05-26 11:58:12.0)