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Styles overhaul: stage one
For the last few months, one of the quiet projects that has been going on is an overhaul of the styles system on Dreamwidth. The styles system for LiveJournal code is mostly very powerful, but there are a number of problems associated with it. Most of these problems can only be fixed by breaking things first, which is what we've been doing.
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Somewhat technical ramblings:
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(1) The S1 style system hasn't been officially supported for years, which means that either new features aren't implemented in that system or that they have to be implemented a second time into the system. These days, with the added wizards and CSS boxes available within S2, it's much more accessible to people at a variety of levels of experience and interest in customization. For these (and other) reasons, S1 will not exist on Dreamwidth.
(2) S2 styles were written by various authors, at various times, and for various reasons. Although many of them have since been standardized, many users still have to choose their style based on what it can *do*, as opposed to how it *looks*. We have been standardizing functionality by moving as much of the logic as possible to the core2 layout. We have also been continuing to standardize the wizards in the same way, so that users can more easily make changes. And we've been standardizing CSS classes and IDs across styles, so that users can duplicate CSS in the wizards or make use of them in GreaseMonkey and Styleish scripts. This is taking a long time, but will be worth it in the long run.
For those of you who are anxious to get working on new styles, we're still not done getting these standardizations done in a way that will help you work on them. I promise that it's one of the priorities, and one of the reasons that we're working on this overhaul in the first place: to make it easier for people to author styles. Please continue to be patient.
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What all this means:
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If you aren't using a customized style, you may have noticed that the ugly and plain style you've been forced to use has now been replaced with a... still ugly and plain style, but one that has more functionality. This is our first draft of core2, the underlying code that is used to power all the other styles that are coming your way. We aim to have a stable building block with which to build other styles; styles won't have to create a lot of functionality from scratch each time.
The draft you're using doesn't have any wizard functionality, so you can't add headers or change background colours or make any of a million tweaks that will be standard. There will be features that you don't use that are showing up, that later you'll be able to remove them. And things that are ugly. But you guys all know this is beta :) So, please, poke at it, poke at journals, poke at communities, poke at syndicated feeds. If you're on the beta team, please follow your usual bug reporting procedures as per![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
domtheknight. If you're not, please contact me (I like IRC) or ![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png)
denise for further instruction regarding any problems you find.
Current known issues (more edited in as reported):
Some example things to be expected:
----------------------------------------------------------
Somewhat technical ramblings:
----------------------------------------------------------
(1) The S1 style system hasn't been officially supported for years, which means that either new features aren't implemented in that system or that they have to be implemented a second time into the system. These days, with the added wizards and CSS boxes available within S2, it's much more accessible to people at a variety of levels of experience and interest in customization. For these (and other) reasons, S1 will not exist on Dreamwidth.
(2) S2 styles were written by various authors, at various times, and for various reasons. Although many of them have since been standardized, many users still have to choose their style based on what it can *do*, as opposed to how it *looks*. We have been standardizing functionality by moving as much of the logic as possible to the core2 layout. We have also been continuing to standardize the wizards in the same way, so that users can more easily make changes. And we've been standardizing CSS classes and IDs across styles, so that users can duplicate CSS in the wizards or make use of them in GreaseMonkey and Styleish scripts. This is taking a long time, but will be worth it in the long run.
For those of you who are anxious to get working on new styles, we're still not done getting these standardizations done in a way that will help you work on them. I promise that it's one of the priorities, and one of the reasons that we're working on this overhaul in the first place: to make it easier for people to author styles. Please continue to be patient.
----------------------------------------------------------
What all this means:
----------------------------------------------------------
If you aren't using a customized style, you may have noticed that the ugly and plain style you've been forced to use has now been replaced with a... still ugly and plain style, but one that has more functionality. This is our first draft of core2, the underlying code that is used to power all the other styles that are coming your way. We aim to have a stable building block with which to build other styles; styles won't have to create a lot of functionality from scratch each time.
The draft you're using doesn't have any wizard functionality, so you can't add headers or change background colours or make any of a million tweaks that will be standard. There will be features that you don't use that are showing up, that later you'll be able to remove them. And things that are ugly. But you guys all know this is beta :) So, please, poke at it, poke at journals, poke at communities, poke at syndicated feeds. If you're on the beta team, please follow your usual bug reporting procedures as per
domtheknight. If you're not, please contact me (I like IRC) or denise for further instruction regarding any problems you find.Current known issues (more edited in as reported):
- ugly
- No wizard
- CSS incomplete
- HTML not validated on all views
- Two "tags" listings in sidebar - this is because one is to display multi-level tags. Multi-level tags are a change in display, only. Use : as a separator between words in your tags to make use of this feature.
- openID user URLs in the sidebar overlap with the rest of the page text. Have to decide whether to make really wide sidebars, or do something else with the usernames.
- On the Reading page sidebar, usernames are printed for users posting in communities, but not for users printing in their own journal.
- On the Reading page sidebar, usernames are printed for users posting in communities, but not the community name.
- On communities that you can manage tags, the "Manage Tags" link under the "Tags" modules will not appear, as S2 has no way of knowing who can manage tags.
- On the month view, entries that have links will not work as expected. Instead, the HTML in the subject should be stripped and printed plain, and then linked to the entry.
- The Month module shouldn't be displayed when viewing an openid's reading page
- Unclosed h3 tag on the Day Page
Some example things to be expected:
- You should be able to perform the same "user interactions menu" options on any journal page as you can on the profile page. This means adding and/or modifying your circle relationships, posting to a journal, and tracking entries. If you see something different, report it. If the text describing the action is incorrect, report it.
- There are two linkbars for working on your entries, one for "edit entry, edit tags, add to memories, track this" and one for "x comments, leave a comment". Each link should only display to a user who can do that specific action. If you see something different, report it. If the action is describing the action is incorrect, report it.
- etc, etc