Phillip, the template you provided was excellent. It faithfully reproduces the current look and feel of the site on top of MT. I’ve kept the template as you provided it intact, and linked it to ”/bht/oldstyle.html.” From my perspective, there are two issues with that template that, while they take nothing away from your technical achievement, make using it problematic. Let me try and explain:

In the Blogger word, you only have to worry about two templates. One is for the main page, and the other is for the archives. There are no comments, no category archives, no individual pages, no monthly archives, etc. So if you change the look and feel, you can just edit the two templates and be on your merry way. And if you’re like Michael and don’t bother with archiving, you have only one to change.

In MT, things are different. There are several different templates. MT attempts to apply a more sophisticated site design principle. In the MT world, a “template” is a more of a semantic description of a page. Most of the “presentation” details are handled via CSS, including things like positioning sections on the page, etc. For example, using the default MT templates, you can make fairly drastic changes to a site’s appearance simply by switching style sheets.

We’ve been trying to meet a couple of objectives with the site design:

  • Take advantage of MT features. Thus, titles and categories, dynamic content, comments, RSS feeds, etc.

  • Stay close to the MT default templates where possible, and use CSS like MT does. This one is important, because a lot of the MT plugins we’ll be using assume that the basic styles as defined in the default templates are availible. If we diverge from the default styles, we have the problem of needing to both maintain our own style definitions for the BHT-ish things, plus the defaults for those things that assume they are around. I sort of made an executive decision, since at some point I assume Michael is going to want to take over the look and feel himself, that sticking to the defaults was best. I’m not religious about this – XMLHead runs on MT, and it certainly doesn’t use anything like the default templates. But I figure that if something happens and Michael goes looking for MT help, it will be more forthcoming if BHT stays within the general framework.

  • Keep up with Michael’s requests. Once you satisfied him that MT could make a site that looks exactly like BHT today, I suspect he became less worried about still having a blog up and was free to consider experimentation. The result is, our target shifted from “make it look like BHT” to something else – something more difficult to define, because it’s verbalized with statements like “I like this site. We should make it look this this.” or “I’ve been thinking we should change the font.” I’m trying to react to those, help him experiment.