One of the very first things I did after creating my blog was to ditch my decorator template so that I could have more options with creating templates. My main goal was to create a css file for my blog, but you could of course create all kinds of different files using templates ... txt, html, xml, etc. Here's how I did it ...

To start you simply login to roller and go to the page Weblog > Page Templates.

First, edit the template named "_decorator" and copy all of its contents and paste it somewhere safe like a text editor. Now, go to the template named "Weblog" and copy all of its contents and paste it over the line with "decorator_body" in the text editor where you copied your decorators contents.

Here is a screenshot of what I mean so we don't get confused.

This means you should now have a combined copy of the "_decorator" template and "Weblog" template in your text editor. Next, copy the whole combined template from your text editor and paste it back into the "Weblog" template replacing whatever was there before, then save it. The last step is to simply rename the "_decorator" template to something else, like "_decorator_old" and save it. done.

To verify, go visit your weblog page and make sure it looks the same as it was before. If nothing looks different then you've done it right and you are now capable of adding new templates which don't use the decorator.

I'll post a follow up to this where I create a custom css template and show how I included it in my blog page. Until then ...