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Documentation questions!
Now that the styles overhaul is closer to complete, the styles documentation team, led by ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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?
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?
no subject
I don't actually care enough about my layout beyond "does it make my eyes bleed? No? Okay then" to spend very much time tinkering, so I'm likely not the target of this question (and also, you know, I've been here for like five minutes), but one of the things I have repeatedly found myself thinking about the LJ documentation on those rare occasions that I have wanted to alter something for, say, a comm layout, was that I really wanted any given pre-made layout to come with a literal picture of which elements were altered by changing what, possibly in the form of something like a screenshot(s) of a page with little mouseover pop-ups or other diagram (arrows) that display the name of the element/class/id/whatever, since IME the approach is "here is the thing I don't like, and I don't know what it's called to look for it and fix it" at least as often as "what all will happen if I change this thing?"
Generally speaking, once I have found whatever element it is I care about changing, the name makes okay sense and all, but as is true any time one is playing with a system one didn't design, another person's naming logic or organization isn't necessarily intuitive.