Blogger Pages are finally out

Blogger has now released the pages feature just like in Wordpress blogs. You can use these pages for about me, contact me etc. The blogger pages are more or less like the blogger posts. But these pages wont appear in the blog archives and the blog feeds.

How to create a Blogger Page?

1. Login to your Blogger Account

2. In the posting Tab you will find an Edit Pages option

3.Click on the New Page button and you will get a new page editor(same as the post editor that you normally use)

4.You can make the page, in the same way as you create a post.If you want to enable commenting on the page, then you can do so from the post options

5. When you hit the Save And Publish Page button, you will be asked if you would like to add the Page Gadgets onto your blog

You can add the page gadget on the sidebar or as Top navigation Tabs.These widgets may not properly sync with your blog template.So i would advise you to choose the No Gadget option and add the links manually to your blogger template. You can obtain the links to the newly created pages from the Edit Pages Tab.

If you opt to add any of Pages gadget, then you will get an easy interface to add the page links to your blog. (now available on draft.blogger.com only) Here is what the Gadget options will look like

 

Limitations

1. You can only create a maximum of 10 pages.

2. Separate templating for pages would be a little too difficult(but not impossible :) )

3. The Static Pages are not included in the Post Exports till now.(at the time when this post is made)

Advanced options.

If you are familiar with the usage of blogger’s conditional tags and want to do something special with the pages, then you can use the following conditional tag for that

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;static_page&quot;'>
When condition is true this will be done
</b:if >

eg: If you want to hide the sidebar on the Static Pages, then you can use these conditional tags properly to implement that

Here is the incomplete sample code for the same

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;static_page&quot;'>
<style type="text/css">
.sidebar-wrapper{display:none;}
</style>
</b:if >

This code should be placed above </head> in your template.

you will have to add some more CSS definitions to make it complete(you should increase the width of the post area.. ) these will be different from template to template. So  you will have to figure it out :)

So are some of my Blogger Pages. – Subscribe , Contact Me

Misbehaviour

1. If you are using the automatic post summaries hack, then your pages might not be properly displayed. I have updated the Automatic Post Summaries Trick so that it does not conflict with the static pages. So if you are using an older version of this trick, then do update

2. If you are using some trick to hide the post contents on non-post pages,then also you might end up with  problems on your new Static Blogger Page. You can either undo the trick or update the codes properly to avoid conflicts :)