you saved my day! i just started reading a book about sociological theory but now i now what i'll do instead.

Oh john. You just made my heart beat fast with excitement! The new show is on.

I spent way too much time investingating this thing today. Here's the results of the investigation, up until the point that stamina gave out and real work priorities took over.

It's a bit of a long post, and I'd be glad to just port it over here to get it off of my front page.

And I still don't know how to make the "links" field show up.

Scott,

Great walkthrough! The links field (the one on the create post window, right?) is under settings > formatting > show link field, & seems to work pretty much the way it always has....

One discovery I made is that if you remove the:

<b:section class='footer' id='footer'/>

code, the template stops working. I am having huge trouble finding out how to get certain data with the new tag strcture (blog id and feed URL, specifically), but am slowly making progress towards translating my Singpolyma Templates into the new widget-compatible code. If I am successful, this will mean they can be used on Blogger BETA and that people will be able to change the colours and rearrange widgets using the new editor :) It will also fully ground me in the new template tags system, and force me to translate most of my old hacks (my two comment forms not least among them).

John,

Yes, the links option is in the settings, but I can't get it to show up anywhere in the template or on the page.

If you have found a way (or a template that supports that field), please scroll through your template and let me know what data object to use to make them show up.

John, don't know whether you looked at my drop-down labels hack. But, here's a more useful hack to display only the post titles in label pages, search results or archive pages. I have also shared my understanding of widget code in this post.

*sigh* Man this is much harder to work with than the last set! I suppose because there isn't a body of knowledge. I'm making progress, but it's dead slow. The worst is that invalid code often causes the editor to insert a bunch of junk... but so does valid code sometimes! Can't wait for (http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=46995) to go live... and hopefully help the process out a bit...

My post got slashdotted. 5000 visitors last hour and the comments are -occasionally- quite useful.

I'll enjoy the ride for a while, then probably just port the whole thing over to the wiki. In the meantime, any comments or suggestions or notations of glaring faults are appreciated.

I transferred my (Dutch) blog to beta yesterday, and I just wanted to let you know that I value the articles your wrote on Beta. Thanks for all the tips!

Hi fellow Bloggers, I wrote some small tutorials on how to customize the sections of beta blogger, and how you can add a second sidebar to the template. This second sidebar can be filled with page elements from the layout editor.
See my experimentel beta blog here.

Hans