Styles documentation update

[foxfirefey]

So, as a recap after about a week of work, there are now two main documentation bodies springing up for S2. I think there's currently enough space both for beginner and more advanced level documentation within those two sets.

S2 Guide: The Language Tutorial is filling out nicely as a first draft. However, the more I work at it in its current state, the more I think it's going to need to be rearranged for better flow at teaching beginners. The Style System Overview has a little bit of content, but is still kind of clunky. But the Troubleshooting section has some pretty awesome stuff right now, if I do say so myself. Haven't yet started on the Core2 Overview, Backend, Glossary, or Language Reference (a more concise version of the Language Tutorial, for cheatsheet checking or referral by people who already know programming).

S2 Cookbook: This starts out with a testbed layout that lets people have a really simple environment to test out code bits. A couple example pages starting to get filled in are strings and on Dates.

Other miscellanea:

* matgb has pointed out that the advanced page points to defunct documentation URLs. What's worse, the layout editor does, too. Hopefully we can point it at the S2 guide instead, or the core2 layer documentation.
* Doing this documentation has also given me several ideas for built in functions to add. For instance, S2 has a split function for strings, but no "join" function for string arrays. Why is there no join function! Does anybody have any input on that?
* Some people have already been diving in to tweaking and editing! Thank you murklins and azurelunatic for your assistance. And thank you everybody who gave your input on the last post on this topic!
* ninetydegrees has some suggestions up regarding this area: Your Layers page: redesign layers table as a tree , Styles: Add links to Your Layers, and Improve the S2 Compiler. They're making me think that instead of wee changes, each area should just go through a redesign. What do you envision the advanced customization area operating like?

Comments

[ninetydegrees]

"Your journal appearance is determined by the current Style you have running. a Style is made up of a number of Layers. These can be public Layers from the supported Styles, or your own custom layers created below. All styles will need a Layout layer, which will call the basic functions from the Core, and will also create an Auto layer, which, really, you don't want to touch from here, it takes all its data from the Wizard you've already used. You can also create a User layer, which can override or rearrange Core or Layout functions, there are some worked eaxamples on the Wiki here"

I really, really like the way you've phrased this. I'll rephrase the bit about auto layers always being part of a style because it's not true. You've got Wizard layers if you've used the wizard. :) Any non-custom styles will have Theme layers, though.

[matgb]

I was thinking of how if you've got Links and Text, it copies that across into an auto layer, I've never bothered to find out how it's done.

But if it makes sense, that's good.

[ninetydegrees]

Text will go into the Wizard layer; links won't. They're independent. There's a bug to make text independent as well so that you can keep it if you switch styles.

[matgb]

Ah, excellent. That's acutally quite important for me at the moment, I'm doing alternate styles for those weird people that find dark backgrounds harder to read that'll work for non-logged in non-DW types, so want it as similar as possible, but migraine inducingly pale instead.

So that actually answers a question I hadn't looked up yet, danke.

[ninetydegrees]

You're most welcome!