Impressed by WordPress’s Andreas04 template, I wondered if we can have some thing similar for Blogger beta. The answer is yes. Please view the image to understand the layout I am referring to:
It is much easier to play around with the template in Blogger beta because of its easy to understand template script language and the flexibility to view the template in collapsed and expanded widgets view (about which I will discuss a little later).
Co-incidentally this layout is same as Ramani’s blog design (where he calls the third sidebar a widebar and for simplicity sake I shall also do the same). Click here to preview the implementation of this hack in Blogger beta.
Before we proceed and learn how to implement this layout, I would like to discuss some nitty-gritty of the beta template. I do not want to give a detailed walk-through of the template here. You can find that here.
Wrappers are an important part of the Blogger beta template and in simple terms they are used to allocate/fix some thing in its place. To explain this I will use an example. Suppose you have a large piece of land and you want to build a school, a shopping mall, a hotel and theater and a pizza store on it. One of the first steps in planning will be to identify where to build what. Once that is done, you will allot a portion of the land to that item.
In your template, what is your land is defined by some thing called ‘outer-wrapper’ (if you exceed a particular size, you page will fall out of an average user’s screen area). In this land (the outer-wrapper), you can create/allot a space for:
1. School (say header using header-wrapper),
2. Pizza store (say sidebar1 using sidebar1-wrapper),
3. Theater (say sidebar2 using sidebar2-wrapper),
4. Shopping mall (say widebar using widebar-wrapper) and
5. Hotel (blog’s main section (where posts appear) using a main-wrapper)
Some templates do not assign wrappers for the individual page sections like sidebars, blog main etc, however in my template each of the blog main, sidebars and the header have their own separate wrapper.
Once the wrappers are done (i.e. space alloted), you need to set the parameters for the construction of the buildings. All of this is done in the “page structure” section of the template. (may vary according to the template you use)
Some specifics are also set further below this section, like this:
Another nice thing about the template (as mentioned earlier) is the collapsed and the expanded widgets view. In the <body> section of the template (when viewed in the collapsed widgets (or default) view), you should be able to make out that each of these page sections like blog main, sidebars etc are in the following coding format.
<div id=’sidebar2-wrapper’>
<b:section class=’sidebar’ id=’sidebar2′>
<b:widget id=’Label1′ locked=’false’ title=’Labels’ type=’Label’/>
<b:widget id=’HTML1′ locked=’false’ title=’link exchange’ type=’HTML’/>
<b:widget id=’HTML5′ locked=’false’ title=” type=’HTML’/>
<b:widget id=’BloggerButton1′ locked=’false’ title=” type=’BloggerButton’/>
</b:section></div>
Notice how the actual section is enclosed within the wrapper. Also notice the widget tags, the page elements (draggable and droppable boxes) we add from the layout section of the Blogger beta dashboard. These widget tags are the ones that expand in the expanded widgets view.
Here is how an expanded widget looks like in the expanded template:
Coming back to the wrappers, all these wrappers will inturn be enclosed in the ‘outer-wrapper’ (the land) which starts immediately after the <body> tag:
<body>
<div id=’outer-wrapper’> <div id=’wrap2′>
[code]
</div></div >
Note that the blog main and the sidebars are enclosed in an additional wrapper called the content-wrapper that distinguishes it from the header and the footer wrappers/sections.
The hack
Note:
1. This hack is highly customized for the dots-dark template. I recommend that you go ahead with it if you have some experience working with the Blogger template and can troubleshoot simple design/formatting issues.
2. If you have even the slightest doubt, please first try this hack on a test blog (create a new blog if you don’t have one) and then implement it on your original blog)
3. If you cannot fix some issue and wish to e-mail me with the problem, please do so with your template code (in non-expanded form) as a text file attachment.
Now that you have read the tutorial above, implementing this hack becomes very easy. All you need to do is create an additional sidebar wrapper (name it widebar) and set its parameters and modify the <body> part to reflect the same. This can be done irrespective of whether you are using two side bars or one sidebar. However, having this hack with two sidebars makes more sense to me 
.
This code goes into the <head> section of the template, where you find similar code. For example this code will fit well just above the ‘sidebar-wrapper’.
#widebar-wrapper {
width:360px;
float:right;
padding-bottom:10px;
word-wrap: break-word; /* fix for long text breaking sidebar float in IE */
}
#widebar {
width:360px;
padding:10px 0 5px 10px;
word-wrap: break-word; /* fix for long text breaking sidebar float in IE */
}
This is how your sidebar wrappers and parameter settings code should look like:
#sidebar1-wrapper {
width:150px;
float:right;
margin-left:5px;
padding-bottom:10px;
word-wrap: break-word; /* fix for long text breaking sidebar float in IE */
}
#sidebar2-wrapper {
width:150px;
float:right;
margin-left:20px;
padding-bottom:10px;
word-wrap: break-word; /* fix for long text breaking sidebar float in IE */
}
#sidebar1 {
padding:0 0 10px 5px;
width:150px;
}
#sidebar2 {
padding:0 0 10px 5px;
width:150px;
}
If you want to have the blog-main section on the right and the sidebars on the left, change the “float” value in widebar-wrapper and sidebar-wrapper to “left” and in the main-wrapper, change it to “right”. Also make the necessary adjustments to the margin and padding values.
Once you are done with that, go to the body section (in the unexpanded view) and insert this just above the main block but within the content-wrapper:
<div id='widebar-wrapper'>
<b:section class='sidebar' id='widebar' preferred='yes'>
</b:section></div>
Look at the image below to see how it looks like (make sure that the order of the wrappers is exactly the same).
As this hack requires/assumes reader have a fair idea of working with the beta template, if your are not into template editing, I suggest that you try this out in a test blog first. Happy blog modding. Until next time.
Note:
1. I know that some of the coding mentioned here might be different in your blog but the basis of design is the same (that’s why the tutorial before that hack). If you are unable to find something in the code, I suggest that you copy the template code (in non-expanded form) into a text editor and then look for it.
2. If you have even the slightest doubt, please first try this hack on a test blog (create a new blog if you don’t have one) and then implement it on your original blog.
Updates:
1. Annie from BlogU has developed a fluid version of this hack that teaches one to make a widebar such that it resizes it self according tp the browser window size. Check it out here.
2. If on certain pages/main page of your blog, the sidebars appear beside the widebar instead of underneath the widebar, please follow the fix from here or directly look at the fix here.
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