State of the Styles, post code-push 0.4.0

[afuna]

First, the big news:

There's a new module available for paid and premium users and communities, which contains a list of your latest active entries.

We are aware that it's showing up in the header in some styles (notably Transmogrified and Sunday Morning -- we'll be double-checking the other styles to make sure the module shows up where it belongs), and we'll have that fixed by next code push. In the meantime if it is showing up in a strange location in your journal, you can modify its position, or deactivate it here:

http://www.dreamwidth.org/customize/options?group=modules

Under the cut: new themes, changes affecting your journal, changes affecting journal customization, other notable styles-related entries.

Much thanks goes to ninetydegrees, wyntarvox, and zvi, who have been rocking the patches. And much <33 and appreciation to everyone who's submitted a theme or layout -- we're still working our way through the submissions, and we're always looking for more!

New themes

We haven't done these in a while, so let me introduce you to the themes newly available with this code push:

• Bases has two new themes by malionette: Beechy (green, with yellow accents. Background is striped vertically in shades of green), Steele (steely greys)


• Boxes and Borders has a new theme by cesy: Light on Dark (just as it says on the label: gray text and borders on a black background)


• Brittle has three new themes by dancing_serpent: Old Roses, Soft Blue, Soft Green


• Drifting has two new themes: Go by zvi (bright green, like the stop light), Soft Blues by ambrya (soft blues, with a dark castle header)


• Fluid Measure has two new themes by dancing_serpent: Pigeon Blue (clean shades of blue), and Beach After Sunset (dusky oranges and aquas)


• Modish has one new theme by zvi: Clean Sheets (whites and blues with orange accents -- fresh and clean)


• Negatives has a new theme by wide_worlds_joy: Azure (strong shades of blue) -- this theme also caused us to introduce a left sidebar option for Negatives


• ETA: Missed these before. Transmogrified has twelve new themes. Three are by dancing_serpent: Frozen Sky (pale blues), Dark Forest (verdant greens; light on dark), Forest Green (verdant greens; dark on light); nine are by branchandroot: Brick Hearth (muted shades of orange), Coming Down Blue (sky blues), Dignified (elegant greys), Dusty Raspberry (dusty greys and reds), Midnight (dark blues and browns), Rose Ice Cream (rose and whites), Slow Green, Spring Green, Summer Peach

On your journal

• We renamed .ljedittime to .edittime as part of an ongoing cleanup effort


• Added a clearing #content-footer div to Tabula Rasa (and hence, Tabula-Rasa based styles)


• For Negatives, added a two-columns-left layout


• For Funky Circles, prevented userpic from overlapping entries with small font sizes


• ETA: For Transmogrified, modified page background to a deeper shade of turquoise, as per designer's wishes.


• We added CSS classes for the pagesummary module so you can style the contents.


• We're persisting more arguments across links, for convenience: ?filter=0 is persisted to skip links, ?s2id=/style=mine/style=light are persisted across more links (journal views, thread links, etc). Among other things, this means that when you preview a theme on your journal, you can easily see how your journal looks in other views


• We picked up a patch from LiveJournal (thanks LJ!), so now we only show skip links if there are earlier entries to look at, catching an edge case when the number of entries left matched the number of entries that could fit on the page exactly


• We no longer show the /network link on paid communities


• We fixed a bug which caused cross-site user tags in entry subjects to show up as if they were Dreamwidth users


• We fixed another bug, where the expand links did not show on comments without replies (they do now)


• And then still yet another bug, where, if you set your journal to default to adult content, all entries on your read page were marked as having adult content


• We picked up another patch from LiveJournal, so now comment pages in the site scheme will display the number of comments (not quite style-system related, but close enough)


• We added a link back to the journal if there are no next/previous entries

In the customize and advanced customization areas

• We now automatically alphabetize properties in custom layers when saving from /customize (but not from /layeredit)


• We've removed the 'show only available styles' checkbox from http://www.dreamwidth.org/customize/ because all styles are available to all users.


• We've opened up ?s2id=x to all users / on all journals as long as all the layers in the style are public -- either system layers, or have a "layerinfo is_public = 1;". The limitation is to address privacy concerns, since some people hardcode text into their layers which is only meant to be viewable to them. Previously, ?s2id=x only worked on your own journal, or when you were viewing someone else's paid journals


• We no longer apply custom (non-auto-generated) user layers, when previewing styles. This should catch some strange instances of "crossed wires" several layout authors have run into while previewing their designs


• We did refactoring for how arguments are passed to ItemRange -- e.g., #comments, to page # of # comments. Should be no user-facing changes


• We separated the variables for the header, footer, entry links in Negatives; your themes should still display the same as before, but just now have an option to make the colors differ from one another
  ETA: It's been pointed out that due to the interaction between system-provided themes and personal customizations, the above statement is not strictly true. If your header/footer/entry footer colors changed, go to http://www.dreamwidth.org/customize/options?group=style. The relevant properties that need changing are under the header and footer subheaders (you may need to expand these first), and also the "entry interaction link background color" under the entry subheader. I'm really sorry for the inconvenience.

Notable styles-related entries this week

• How to create a theme layer for advanced customization


• Custom reading list colors built into all core 2 styles

Comments

[dancing_serpent]

Also, there are twelve new themes for Transmogrified, if I counted them right. *g*

[afuna]

Oops! I missed those because I'd pulled my list of updates from the wrong place. Added them all now -- thank you :)

[dancing_serpent]

You're welcome. *g* It's still my favourite style.

[rho]

We separated the variables for the header, footer, entry links in Negatives; your themes should still display the same as before, but just now have an option to make the colors differ from one another

This (I'm guessing this anyway) is slightly broken, in that some of the colours on my style have reverted to default.

[afuna]

Oh, hmm. I see what happened. What we did was fix it so that if you were using your own theme and user layers, and your properties had no header/footer/entry interaction link color set, it would fall back on the old value.

However, if you're using a system theme layer and customized using the wizard, you'll get the new colors (since they're set in the official theme layer). I can't think of any way around it, unfortunately But if you blank out everything under header/footer, as well as the entry interaction links background, you should get your old colors back.

[yvi]

Ohhh, Steele looks shiny! *snags*

[feathertail]

Excellent. ^.^ Good work all you peopleses!

Thank You Very Much

[onyxlynx]

Thanks, because I didn't want Active Entries and the two lines of text overlapped, and I couldn't find how to turn it off. I have now turned it off.

That's a feature that might do better as a sidebar, if one needs to track trafficked posts.

Re: Thank You Very Much

[foxfirefey]

It was meant to go into the sidebar, but there are several different locations modules can go, and in some layouts it got put into the wrong location by default!

[xenolinguist]

This is fantastic. Thank you so much!

[chaosraven]

I have a custom layout and so it's not showing the new widget even though when I preview other layouts it shows. Does anyone know where I would be looking in my CSS to fix or add it?

[foxfirefey]

It is showing up, I think, it's just not styled like the other modules. So, there is a part of your CSS that has this:

.module-customtext, .module-typelist, .module-tags_list, .module-pagesummary, .module-calendar, .module-syndicate, .module-powered, .module-time {
-moz-background-clip:border;
-moz-background-inline-policy:continuous;
-moz-background-origin:padding;
background:#FFFFFF none repeat scroll 0 0;
border:1px solid #E5E5E5;
margin:0 0 10px;
padding:10px;
}

It's specifically saying which modules get that nice white background and such.

Now, I think it would be best if that was changed to:

div.module-section-one .module {
-moz-background-clip:border;
-moz-background-inline-policy:continuous;
-moz-background-origin:padding;
background:#FFFFFF none repeat scroll 0 0;
border:1px solid #E5E5E5;
margin:0 0 10px;
padding:10px;
}

That way, all modules you put in that section from now on would have the same styling, and they wouldn't have to all be specifically coded for. If that is not the effect you want, you can add .module-active to the list of module classes in the previous CSS.

[chaosraven]

Yay, thanks so much!

[aurora]

Hi! Hi! May I bother you and ask if you perhaps know how to add the active entries box to my layout? (The original code is taken from here.)

[foxfirefey]

Unfortunately, because you've imported a LiveJournal style (which uses S2 core1), it doesn't have the backend necessary to support modules (which are built on S2 core2). So, you have two options:

* Find a DW-based layout you like and use it.
* Find a DW-based layout that has a similar structure to the layout you got from the_fulcrum, and translate the CSS to work with it. (A lot more work, but most likely doable if you know your way around CSS.)

[aurora]

Ah, I see. Thanks anyways!

[zvi]

FYI for anyone who has customized their theme and user layers and doesn't want to mess with the wizard, the relevant settings for the new most active module are

set module_active_order = 8;
set module_active_section = "one";
set module_active_show = 1;

Adjust to make it work with your style. I personally made the section two (which put it in the sidebar on Transmogrified).

[cleverthylacine]

Could you take a look at my page and fairlight's page? We are using an older version of Sunday Morning (we like the graphics better) and for some reason we have all these weird boxes now. Thanks.

[afuna]

Oh hey, I think you got this solved via IRC, but for anyone reading comments, this is what the active entries module being in the header looked like.( weird boxes in the header)

[weofodthignen]

Thanks for the note at the end. I wondered why my journal (customized Negatives) suddenly had black bars instead of red - at first I thought I was misremembering how much I'd changed from the original black, black, black, with a friend patiently giving me instructions. It only took me 2 tries to fix it all by myself, yay!

M