What do Blogger's template tags do?

The <Blogger> tags are called meta tags, because they represent data stored in the Blogger database about your blog. For example, <BlogItemAuthorEmail> is the email address of the author of a post, as stored in the Profile Editor. The following is a list of the Blogger meta tags (good for copying & pasting when template hacking!):

<$BlogEncoding$>

<BlogSiteFeed>
   <$BlogSiteFeedUrl$>
</BlogSiteFeed>

<$BlogOwnerFirstName$>
<$BlogOwnerLastName$>
<$BlogOwnerEmail$>
<$BlogOwnerFullName$>
<$BlogOwnerPhone$>

<Blogger>
   <BlogDateHeader>
      <$BlogDateHeaderDate$>
   </BlogDateHeader>

   <BlogItemTitle>
      <$BlogItemTitle$>
   </BlogItemTitle>

   <$BlogItemBody$>
   <$BlogItemAuthor$>
   <$BlogItemAuthorNickname$>
   <$BlogItemAuthorEmail$>
   <$BlogItemAuthorURL$>
   <$BlogItemDateTime$>
   <$BlogItemNumber$>
   <$BlogItemArchiveFileName$>
   <$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>   

   <BlogDateFooter>
   </BlogDateFooter>
</Blogger>

<BloggerArchives>
   <$BlogArchiveURL$>
   <$BlogArchiveName$>
</BloggerArchives>

As you can see, it looks a lot like HTML. One difference between these tags and HTML is that case is important.

Blogger tags, defined:

• <$BlogTitle$> - The title of the blog.
• <$BlogDescription$> - A description of the blog.
• <$BlogItemBody$> - The text of a post.
• <$BlogItemAuthor$> - The author of a post.
• <$BlogItemAuthorNickname$> - The nickname of the author of a post.
• <$BlogItemAuthorEmail$> - The email address of the author of a post.
• <$BlogItemAuthorURL$> - The homepage URL of the author of a post.
• <$BlogItemDateTime$> - The Date and/or Time of a post.
• <$BlogItemNumber$> - The unique ID number of the post.
• <$BlogItemArchiveFileName$> - The archive filename of the post
• <$BlogItemPermalinkURL$> - The permalink of the post

Date Header
The code between the <BlogDateHeader> tags work a little differently. This code is used to group posts together under a common date heading. It is only used when the date changes. This code:

<Blogger>
   <BlogDateHeader>
      <h4><$BlogDateHeaderDate$></h4>
   </BlogDateHeader>
   <$BlogItemBody$><br />
   <small>posted by <$BlogItemAuthorNickname$> on <$BlogItemDateTime$></small><br /><br />
</Blogger>

would produce this on your blog:

Thursday, July 17, 2003

Hi, this is my third Blogger post.
posted by EBC on 7/17/2003 2:04pm

Blogger's pretty cool!
posted by EBC on 7/17/2003 1:37pm

Wednesday, July 16, 2003

Does this thing work?
posted by EBC on 7/16/2003 9:38am

Titles
For information on how to use the <BlogItemTitle> tags, please see this article.

Date Footer
This works the same way as the Date Header, but there are no value tags associated with it. Here's the example from above with an added footer:

<Blogger>
   <BlogDateHeader>
      <h4><$BlogDateHeaderDate$></h4>
   </BlogDateHeader>
   <$BlogItemBody$><br />
   <small>posted by <$BlogItemAuthorNickname$> on <$BlogItemDateTime$></small><br /><br />
   <BlogDateFooter>
   --------------------
   </BlogDateFooter>
</Blogger>

would produce this on your blog:

Thursday, July 17, 2003

Hi, this is my third Blogger post.
posted by EBC on 7/17/2003 2:04pm
--------------------

Blogger's pretty cool!
posted by EBC on 7/17/2003 1:37pm
--------------------

Wednesday, July 16, 2003

Does this thing work?
posted by EBC on 7/16/2003 9:38am
--------------------

New Template Tags

• Archives: You can now include your archive listing on the main page of your blog without resorting to messy javascript. For example:

  <BloggerArchives>
    <a href='<$BlogArchiveURL$>'><$BlogArchiveName$></a>
  </BloggerArchives>
  

• Site Feed: Including these tags in the header of your template will allow the RSS feed for your blog to be auto-discovered by supporting aggregators. Example:

  <BlogSiteFeed>
    <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="<$BlogSiteFeedUrl$>" />
  </BlogSiteFeed>
  

• Blog Owner Tags: We've introduced tags for to include elements of the blog owner's user profile in your template. They are:

  <$BlogOwnerFirstName$>
  <$BlogOwnerLastName$>
  <$BlogOwnerEmail$>
  <$BlogOwnerFullName$>
  <$BlogOwnerPhone$>
  

• Encoding Tag: This tag picks up the encoding setting from the Formatting tab and is to be used in a content-type declaration. Specifically:

  <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=<$BlogEncoding$>" />