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

[cesy]

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