Typepad 101: Duplicating Designs

Welcome to Typepad 101! Whether you want to add some new features to your blog's design, or simply make your blog more functional, Typepad 101 has you covered. Topics covered in this series are suitable for bloggers at any skill level, as long as you're at Pro Basic or above. If you're at the Free Micro level and are interested in upgrading to put these tricks to use on your blog, you can upgrade your account anytime.

When you create a design for any blog in your account, the design is available to be used for any other blog in your account, and you can create copies of your designs. To see all the designs in your Typepad account, go to Blogs > (select blog) > Designs and scroll down to the list of Your Designs. There is no limit to the number of designs you can create, and you may have even more designs than you realized!

Any design in your Typepad account can be quickly duplicated and applied to another blog in your account. Why would you want to duplicate a design?

• Create a duplicate of your blog's design and apply it to a test blog to try out major or minor design changes without impacting your live blog. Check out the article on creating a test blog for tips!
• Apply a similar design to multiple blogs which are grouped together on your site.
• When creating a new blog, you can start with the great design you configured for another blog instead of starting from scratch.

To duplicate a design, go to the Designs list for any blog, scroll down to the list of designs, open the Actions menu next to the design you wish to duplicate, and select Duplicate.

After you duplicate the design, the Designs list will refresh and a copy of the design will be added. By default, the design name will start with "Copy of" followed by the original design name. You can change the name of the design at Actions > Rename.

What is the difference between the original design and the duplicate design? The duplicate design is an exact copy of the design when the copy is created. If you make changes to the original design after the copy is created, the copy will not be changed. Similarly, if you make changes to the copy, the original design will not be changed.

The same modules will display on both the original and copy. For the default modules - e.g. Archives, Categories, Pages - the modules will update with links to the content on the blog the design is applied. For example, if you have hundreds of posts published to the original blog the design was applied, the Archives module will display multiple links to the monthly archives, but if you don't have any posts published to the new blog the duplicate design is applied, no items will be displayed in the Archives module yet.

For the custom modules - e.g. Navigation Bar, Typelists - you may need to update links to your existing blog's content. For instance, the links in the Navigation Bar will not change to link to the new blog's home page.

Don't forget to check out the other Typepad 101 posts in the Tips & Tricks category.

Comments

[Martin Crombie]

That's a handy tool to have for experimenting, very nice Typepad.