Documentation questions!

[ysobel]

Now that the styles overhaul is closer to complete, the styles documentation team, led by ysobel, is starting to write up documentation for various aspects of customization, ranging anywhere from basic ("I don't know HTML or CSS or S2 but I want my journal to be pretty, how do I do that?") to complicated ("I want to create a completely custom style, what all is S2 capable of?") and various points in between.

Obviously, this won't all be ready by open beta. However, since a lot of the documentation is being created from scratch anyway, we decided that it would be a good idea to get input from the people who will actually be using said documentation.

So. Please feel free to answer any of the following questions, or provide any other comments that might be useful! We don't promise that everything everyone suggests will be used, but we will listen to what you have to say.

...with one exception, and I probably don't have to make this explicit but am just in case: A lot of the people who are working on Dreamwidth styles and documentation were also involved with LiveJournal support and documentation. This isn't to say that you have to pretend that everything is perfect -- I will be the first to admit that LJ's S2 manual is (shall we say) less than ideal -- but please be respectful of the people on the other side of the screen. :)

(In other words: we want your feedback, because we want Dreamwidth to have Awesome Documentation [tm], but politeness is always appreciated.)

* What aspects of LiveJournal's styles-related documentation did you find particularly good or useful?

* What did you wish LiveJournal's styles-related documentation had? (particularly, what did you have to figure out for yourself, or ask someone else for?)

* What level of customization are you comfortable with, what would you like to be able to do, and what documentation could Dreamwidth provide to help with transitioning between the two?

* Are there (relevant) questions that you have? What (styles-related) things have you always wanted to know? What else do you want to tell us?

Comments

[axiom_of_stripe]

I am something of an odd duck in that I found the official S2 documentation quite helpful! (Perhaps relatedly, I was developing styles in S1 for long enough to get very frustrated by its limitations, so S2 was dramatic and exciting when it rolled out and I have fond memories of that time period.... I'm also a code monkey and more comfortable building a style from scratch (that is, up from the core) than modifying an existing style.)

The Core Layer 1: Classes page was my base reference page for a long time. Eventually the core changed faster than it was documented there and keeping the core style in front of me was the only way to find things, but the documentation in that original page was nice and straightforward.

The language reference was very simplistic, but as a short presentation of what programming elements were available in S2 it did its job well enough. I don't mind that it was a little chatty.

The Core Layer 1: Date Formats was the only place where I felt a lack of examples slowed me down.

Looking through my old LJ memories, most of my questions revolved around the keys to associative arrays such as Comment.metadata and get_link.

Here are some early reactions to S2 and its documentation/lack thereof:
* http://community.livejournal.com/lj_style/168530.html
* http://community.livejournal.com/s2styles/81965.html
* http://community.livejournal.com/lj_style/277633.html
* http://community.livejournal.com/lj_style/172970.html
* http://community.livejournal.com/lj_style/228111.html