What I want to do is what I think a common, fairly simple thing, but I can't seem to figure it out.

I have just installed the latest version of b2Evolution in a directory called blogs. So the url to the default blog is www.mydomain.com/blogs/blog1.php

I want this blog to look like the existing site. So I created a page blog.php that has the same header and footer as the existing site and I simply want to drop the 'blog' in the content area between the header and footer.

I seem to think I need a stub. So just to test it out with no header or footer, I copied a_stub.php code into the blog.php file. I didn't change anything in the file and got an error

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_LNUMBER in /data/21/3/9/147/3009962/user/3341995/htdocs/blog.php on line 12

So I figured the path was wrong in the copied code and I changed that to

require_once dirname(__FILE__).'/blogs/conf/_config.php';

Great! Now the blog is displaying in its entirety.

I tried adding the header and footer code with the copied a_stub.php code in the main content area. This did not work because the link goes to the original www.mydomain.com/blogs/blog1.php page.

I tried editing the blog1.php page by adding some simple text above and below the 'stub' code. Viewed the page, and this text didn't display

How do I get rid of the existing default template and add the main header and footer to the blog1.php so I can match the overall look of my main site for this blog(along with the main navigation)?