on migrating or not to Blogger Beta
This is just a brief post to answer a few questions and clear up some things. It's not an in-depth technical post or anything, just a "this is the path of migration" sort of post. It goes with the comments attached to
this post.
* When you migrate from Blogger to Blogger Beta, it is based on your
account and any blog attached to your account. Thus, if you have three blogs attached to your account (as I do), they all get shipped over AS-IS to Blogger Beta and the only thing that changes is your login and the server to which you login (beta.blogger.com instead of www.blogger.com). Thus, you cannot migrate selected blogs under your account—they all come along for the ride.
* Migrating your blog
does not screw up any of your template customizations or settings. The act of migrating simply gets your account info squared away and your stuff within the new architecture.
* To reiterate, your custom template remains intact
until you specifically change it to the Layout system.
* You
can manually change one blog to the Layout system and keep your other blog(s) in the classic system, because as with any of your blogs-in-Blogger (beta or otherwise) the blog-specific settings are just that—blog-specific.
* If you keep your blog in classic mode, you
can edit your template just as you always could. What you
cannot do is use the Layout system and therefore the native Blogger categories (labels) system.
* If you switch your blog to the Layout system, you cannot edit the raw template (yet). * If you switch your blog to the Layout system,
you can edit the raw template but be aware it's an entirely new template language* If you switch your blog to the Layout system, you will be starting from scratch. You can make customizations through the Layout system by adding "page elements" using the Layout system editor. The customizations may require massaging, especially when it comes to things that require additions to stylesheets or the placement of items in the HEAD element of your blog.
Since you cannot yet edit the raw template, you cannot create the sort of combo Layouts/custom template that would be necessary to complete the integration of your stuff.* If you migrate your account to Blogger Beta and use any third-party publishing tools (e.g. Performancing for Firefox), you'll be out of luck until a new build of the tool becomes available—developers need to add in new hooks to the system.
I think that clarifies a few things. If not, leave a comment and I'll try again.
Labels: blogger, blogger beta
