New Blogger Launch

Yes some of their templates are gorgeous.

I hope 1.2 ships with some alternate stylesheets, or there is an official “WP-certified Styles” page. ??
An option in WP to store stylesheets in a directory, and to choose one of them to apply to the blog would be interesting too.

WuhWuh have it =) Works perfect ??
/me sits back and watches 1 side saying WP is not CMS and another side screaming for implementing hacks as default :p

pot stirrer…

??

NM, we DO have lots of templates (Stylesheets) without having to pay for it, and excellent support too ??
It can change a lot of things for typepad, which is a paid service, of the same kind as blogger, and it shows Google is interested in developing Blogger. So, like K1773N said on #wordpress earlier today, we could possibly have blogger and the self-hosted blogs.
Good to see some good stuff becoming available for free. ??

Not all those WordPress stylesheets are cross-browser compatible and I doubt very much they went through extensive checks before being posted on Alex’s site. I would like to see an ‘approved’ class of stylesheets like the ‘approved’ hacks, that have been certified as compatible with all major browsers and resolutions. I’m sure there are big name designers who would be willing to contribute in exchange for the kudos from the OS community and the extra exposure ??

Yep, the number one way to make anything a hit on the ‘net is to make it ‘skinable.’

We can’t afford the rock-star designers that Blogger used, I already asked. ??

Well I went ahead and wrote a hack/plugin combination that gives you a Theme manager. I found out of course after I was all but finished that the Dev’s are working on/planning to work on something like this so it kinda is pointless now.
If anyone would like to use it, I could put up the files with directions on how to use it.
Here is a pic of the manager, should look familiar ??
https://chrisjdavis.org/imajes/themes.gif
And yes before you ask, and even if you weren’t; it only allows you to have one theme active at a time. When you activate one it deactivates the previsouly active theme.
The hack portion requires adding some info to your database, so if that scares you, this is not for you.
Let me know here, or on my site in the comments of this post:
https://chrisjdavis.org/index/2004/05/10/a-case-for-cms/502/
If you would like to have this.

There’s already some compatible layouts on Alex’s site. My issue is that the quality is variable and newbies can’t always tell the difference between a good template and a crappy one that only works in IE on a PC at 1024×768 res.
Even just putting the winners of the competition up somewhere on www.remarpro.com and marking them as ‘WP-approved stylesheets’ would be a start, even if we can’t afford the likes of Zeldman just yet ??

Now that I am back from my day job ?? I see a lot activity in this thread.
The reason I said, it would change the face of blogging is, blogger in its earlier incarnation was quite primitive. You could see this cottage industry built around commenting and trackback providers. So if Google wanted to really market it they didn’t have much to brag about. Now in this version it is as good as it gets. I know rebuilding crap is still there, but you gotta agree it is better than before. So if google pushes it further by more marketing mean more blogger in the arena. Eventually who will graduate to their own personal blogs may be on WP, MT etc. Or paid service on blogger, typepad etc. So it does make a ripple sort.
Pankaj

2fargon,
I think you may have misunderstood my post. I basically meant to say that we could have lots and lots of high-quality templates if we had the financial power of Google to pay for people to parachute in and drop on. I totally agree that we have lots of talented and helpful people in the community.
Blogger is for my Mom. I’ll stick to WP!

It’s still the same Blogger it always was

Um, it’s not. The new Blogger isn’t just a cleaned-up interface – it’s now got better templates, real comments (without you having to use HaloScan or anything like that), profiles, individual entry pages, conditional tags and e-mail blogging. It’s nothing that WordPress doesn’t have, but it’s still a substantial update to Blogger.
This is great news for those who want to quickly set up a blog for themselves.

What is non-trivial in this update is that it will result in more people getting into the phenomenon of blogging. This is actually good for the community as it will see a lot more people graduating into better blogging tools, like WordPress/MT/Serendipity etc.
Ofcourse a direct result of that will be the improvement of each of these platforms.
The older Blogger was enough to get me hooked on to blogging. I eventually outgrew it as I needed comments, categories and more!!!
I landed up getting onto the WordPress bus, and did drag along a couple of my friends with me.
As Monkey830 mentioned, the new Blogger is no competition to WP yet, but it still a substantial update!