Styles roll call!

[foxfirefey]

Hello, dw_styles! This post is a roll call for people currently interested in helping out with styles, new and old. While people are always welcome to submit more layouts for consideration as official site-provided layouts (you can read layout submission guidelines in dreamscapes), right now we're looking for people interested in helping us take submitted layouts and themes to the next level in a few areas--and also for people with experience willing to take others under their wing.

Testing out submitted layouts and themes

Pretty much anybody can do this! Look at posts in the needs testing tag and try them out in your browser and report any problems you might be seeing. lim has made a checklist draft that's been turned into a wiki page to build on for further reference, in case you're having trouble thinking of things to check. We're trying to get testers with a wide variety of browser types and window sizes.

Making patches for themes

To do this, you'll need to learn some of the basics of S2, as well as how to edit a submitted theme into a file and submit a patch. You'll probably need to sign up for a Dreamhack; there are guides such as these to help get you started, as well as asking questions here:

• Newbie Guide for Windows People Working on Minor Bugs
• Newbie Guide for People Patching Styles
• Dreamhack Getting Started

Converting submitted layouts into S2

This is the final step that needs to happen for someone's submitted CSS style to be made into a system layout; to do this, one needs to learn varying levels of S2. The layout needs to be parametrized so that the different colors and other options can be changed using the style wizard.

You can use a Dreamhack as a place to edit, or even your regular Dreamwidth account if you have a paid account with open style layer slots. The documentation linked for making theme patches could be useful to layout converters, too.

Making layout and theme thumbnails

Layouts that get accepted into the system need thumbnails for the style browser! There's more to it than just resizing a screenshot of your browser, but if it's something you're interested in, speak up and hopefully our current thumbnailers can explain their techniques.

Comments

[ninetydegrees]

People experienced with CSS may also be interested in:

-- Official styles should support placing icon right or left on entries and comments
-- Add one-column options to official styles
-- Handle deeply nested comment threads in various layouts
-- Resource line shows up beside Layout in credit module with sufficiently short text/small font

Related to #1798: I think it would nice to have varied layouts whenever possible for each style such as two-columns-left for Bases and Brittle or even three-columns-left/right/sides for Transmogrified and Sunday Morning.

[liv]

I am interested in converting layouts to themes, I think that would be a good way for me to dip my toe into writing patches. I am reasonably competent with S2, but I have been hesitating about applying for a Dreamhack because of being intimidated by the whole thing. (Pre-beta, I used to work on afuna's Dreamhack, but she's not maintaining that any more, and I think it's about time I had one of my own.)

If I can get my head round writing patches, I'm willing to work on some of the small gnarly layout bugs or minor feature additions. I'm not a CSS genius though, so would prefer stuff that isn't heavily about appearance and positioning stuff on the screen.

[ninetydegrees]

If you don't mind suggestions, there are some bugs you may be interested in, which I think are more about S2 than CSS:

-- Allow users to customize their navigation links
-- Favorite Tags in Tag Module
-- tag cloud does not have own font sizing
-- module_userprofile_opts_userpic not linked to existence of userpic in s2 core
--Improve print_module_syndicate (core2)

[liv]

Thanks, those look like just my sort of thing. 2362 I've had my eye on for a while, and I could probably have a go at 2231. Beyond that, I have Add additional classes to page wrapper assigned to me for ages, and now that its dependency is cleared up it looks manageable.

[cesy]

I'm happy to do some testing, but may need occasional prodding, as I keep forgetting all this stuff exists.