New styles, featured layouts, layouts by type, revised link text, dw_styles management

[afuna]

mark did a code push today! Which means there's lots of exciting news for this entry.

...not all of which is good

First of all, oops. If you're a user of a Transmogrified-based theme, you may have noticed some elements in your journal are missing some background colors. This was a side effect of some cleanup we did, where we moved some colors around. This wasn't supposed to break anything, but it did. I'm sorry about that -- hold on another half a day or so; we have a fix coming up.

ETA: Fixed now.

But most of it is!

New styles

The Select Journal Style page is very different from how it looked two weeks ago. The past two code pushes have given us a ton of color themes to play with, and now we have five new layouts.

Blanket
by sforzinda

Bases
by sven

Sunday Morning
by regna

Tranquility III
by branchandroot

Funky Circles
by ninetydegrees

Blanket came out in the last codepush, but we didn't give it a proper shout-out, so I'd like to mention it here! I love this layout; I have a fuzzy peach blanket with teddy bears in blue bowties which look just like the peach theme. Ahh fuzzy warm childhood memories </embarrassing revelation of this entry>.

Bases is very clean, very light, very fresh. There are a few careful tweaks in there, and much attention paid to detail -- try it out and you'll see what I mean :-) It also has the distinction of being the layout with the fastest time between when it went live on the site, and when someone who wasn't the original author submitted a theme (I was showing it off to a friend, and she liked the layout so much, she submitted a color variation on the spot).

Sunday Morning is elegant, elegant, and did I say elegant? If you're a member of dreamwidthlayouts, you're probably already familiar with the basic layout. We had to use another image than what you've seen before because of image licensing issues, but regna stepped up and made not just one but two header image variations.

Tranquility III is based on Tranquility II from LiveJournal. Soothing. Tranquil. Relax. Written by branchandroot, who has done six layouts for us so far with over twenty color variations of the various layouts (and may I just say, major major <3)

Funky Circles is quirky, retro, funky! Best viewed in a browser which supports shadows and the like, but really, it looks good everywhere. If you're interested in creating a new theme based on this layout, ninetydegrees has helpfully provided the .psd files of her layout's images.

Do check out the new layouts! And if you find that none of them fit your current needs, well we have a few more layouts coming up.

One of them, EasyRead, is a layout written specifically for low-vision users. We were hoping to have it out by this codepush, but ran into a few last-minute problems in testing, so we want to hammer those out first before pushing it live. Other layouts we expect to finish soon are Fluid Measure (rounded corners with strong colors), Snakes and Boxes (clean separation of sections into boxes), Skittlish Dreams (bright and candy-like colors), as well as even more themes for existing layouts.

Speaking of which, we're always looking for new layouts and themes. Each theme will give you two months paid time, five invite codes, and our eternal gratitude (contents may not be as pictured on the package, batteries not included, yadda yadda). See dreamscapes for details -- don't forget to submit a CLA, first, though.

Featured Themes

Now that we have more layouts and more color themes, we've changed around the Featured themes to show off new color variations of the existing layouts (as well as include all the new, just-introduced layouts).

In fact, and for the first time, we have more than twelve base layouts. That means that we don't have enough room in the Featured categories to showcase one color theme of each layout (which was always the case before). We've had to move some layouts off the Featured list. Considering how empty the customize area was just a few weeks ago, um, that's kind of crazy!

Categorizing Layouts

Luckily those layouts will still be easy to find. We've added a new category, one that lets you view styles by their base layout type. Once on that page, you can click on the layout name to see all color themes for that layout.

This option was overwhelmingly in the lead when we conducted our poll on layout categories (PS. If you still haven't voted/commented, you can still do so now ;-)).

We got a lot of good feedback from that entry and the poll, and we definitely want to do the other things that were suggested. We'll be adding more categories and ways to discover layouts, but those require a bit more work for us to go through the layouts and sort through them. This option is easy, very popular, and it's good timing to add it now, so we pushed it in earlier than the rest.

Enjoy!

Revised text

For reasons of accessibility, we long ago decided to use the same link text across all official layouts. However, as we got more layouts, we discovered that in some, the current link text is too long to fit comfortably, and we needed shorter variations. And then after that, we found that some of the original longer text was difficult to coerce into a shorter form while still making sense, so we decided to change some of the longer forms as well. It's not happening in this code push, but we'll be doing this some time in the next few weeks:

Original, long and short forms of entry link text

Original (long)	Proposed long	Proposed short
Previous Entry	--	Previous
Next Entry	--	Next
Add to Memories	Add Memory	Memory
Untrack This	--	Untrack
Tell Someone	Share This Entry	Share
Leave a comment	Reply	Reply

The changes in the text will only affect your journal if you haven't customized the text; if you have, then your journal won't be affected at all. And, because someone expressed concern that proposing standard text like this would be taking away choices, I think it's important to let you know that you will always be able to change text on your style as applied to your journal -- only the default text of the official layouts will be subject to standardization.

Changes to dw_styles community management

I've been thinking a lot about the current state of styles, and one thing that is important is to have a free flow of communication. I want to either open up dw_styles to moderated posting, or to have a weekly/monthly discussion entry.

No decision yet; but expect an entry on this soon.



ETA: Added link to the quick and dirty guide creating a color theme above (and here)