Showing posts with label b. Show all posts
Showing posts with label b. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Blogger.com's still lacks conditional "widgets"

Google's Blogger team has been quite productive since last year (2009). First the new handling of widgets, aligning this feature with iGoogle gadgets. Then little but much needed features like the menu bar for pages (or alternatively the link gadget). And of course the "read more" feature, new and improved gadgets... The biggest and most significant upgrade has been the Blogger Template Designer. With one stroke, it made our previous design tweaks to templates out-dated. Which we appreciate :-)
As of autumn 2010, the designer is a great, though unpolished, diamond. Lot's of little things which we would love to see improved.

But most of all we would like to be able to use "display conditions" for widgets / gadgets. Only show selected posts or gadgets on the homepage. Please let us select when to display gadgets, they don't need to be on every page or post. This would also make it so much easier to display "featured posts or articles" on the homepage. Ie, it'll be great to indicate if a gadget should be shown:
  • "only/not on homepage"
  • "only/not for posts which have the label/tag/filter 'ABC'"
  • "only/not on pages"
  • "only/not on page 'XYZ'"
Additionally, those display conditions would be great to combine with layout areas of the "Page Elements". IE, "only display the right sidebar if..."

We have of course tried to include those conditions when creating our own gadgets. But Blogger seems to parse the code and ignore those <b> conditions within widgets / gadgets. 



Amanda Kennedy has posted a nice and relatively simple tweak on her BloggerBuster. Of course, one "problem remains". If you change your template in the new designer, you will loose all tweaks which are not "within" blogger elements such as those gadgets.