Saturday, February 24, 2007

Customising 'Comments'

Hi, I want to replace the word 'Comments' with something else in my blog. I switched to New Blogger recently and lost that bit of customisation. Where exactly do I make the change in the template? Thanks


This Post was written by Sra from When My Soup Came Alive

6 comments:

Trig said...

Click on "Template" and then click on "Edit Html". Then tick the box that says "Expand Widget Templates". Select all, copy and save to a text file using whatever text application you are happy with (Notepad, MS Word, etc). If you make a mistake you will need to copy this saved version and paste it back to your blog.

Now copy the saved template and search through it. You will find in the main posting widget references to data elements
<data:top.commentLabel/> and
<data:top.commentLabelPlural/>.

These are the singular and plural captions used for 1 comment and for 0 or more than 1 comment respectively. You could simply replace these with the text you want to use, but better to change the variable names (inside the tags) to "myCommentSingular" and "myCommentPlural" and then define these at the top of your template. Look at the other variable definitions for examples to copy.

That does the post footers. There are other variables for the other places where "comments" appears and you should be able to find these quite easily and take similar action.

When you've made all the changes, copy and paste from your edit document back into your template and check that the changes are working by clicking on "Preview". When you are happy, save the template changes.

sra said...

Hi, thanks for answering my query. It didn't seem to work - the variables were about colour and font rather than the text, that's the impression I got

FJKramer said...

Sra,
Here's an easy fix using new blogger that should work.

Go to Layout, go to page elements, select edit blog posts. You'll see a list of choices for a variety of items including a white box with the word "comments" delete the word comments and replace it with "love notes" "letters from my readers" whatever you want.

(without the quotes unless you want them to appear, too.)

Make sure the choice is still selected for your newly renamed comments and save your edits and republish.

All your posts should now sport your new terms for comments.

good luck,
faith

Trig said...

That makes me feel a bit daft, fjk, because I never noticed the edit option for blog posts after I updated my classic template.

But I did test out the comment I wrote, sra, so I'm puzzled. Still, better to follow fjk's approach.

sra said...

Hi FJK, I discovered that soon after I posted my second message in that thread! Can't believe things can be so simple when you're used to wading through lines and lines of code, unintelligible to me in Blogger old and new! Thanks for writing in.
Trig, I must appreciate you for your patient explanation. I think the problem was that we expected customising to be problematic and therefore went in for the tougher option - very often, the instructions in Help or Help Centre or help groups are not clear, but I'm not sure it can be totally jargon-free, ever. I don't see Links to this Post on the blog now, though, only when I click through to the particular post, is that normal? I've checked both boxes in Settings as well as the 'Blog Posts' column.

HGH 191 said...

Informative articles and news, great to read all the responses and input, thanks for your contributions and opinions.