Negatives, Core2, and Zesty roundup.

[aveleh]

Hey guys, I'm just checking in. We've got a whole huge heap of changes getting made in this weekend, and there will be a series of posts to talk about them. In the meantime, here's some pointers as to where to get styles help:

If you are using Negatives and are having problems, that link is the best place to list them.

If you are using core2 and are having problems, the earlier post is a good place to leave a note.

Mark also committed a new style, Zesty. The styles team hasn't had a chance to look at it, and so it's not considered supported. If you're having problems with it, you can leave a comment here. Other users might have suggestions for how to resolve your problem, and if not, it's a central place to collect these issues for later investigation.

Comments

[matgb]

Zesty is nice and flexible--I prefer the colour scheme to Negatives, but I really want to be able to go in there and edit CSS for myself, wants a dark background, getting headaches.

Really impressed with the custom favicon textbox and the way I can rejig and reword the page title appearance, took a bit to figure out what it was doing but incredibly useful, still haven't figure out how to reorder that on LJ, really bad SEO.

Can those two options be made standard features on all layouts?

[sohotrightnow]

Agreed -- all I really want at the moment is an easy way to go in and tweak the CSS.

[aveleh]

(Sorry, I am just now catching up on comments. YIKES.)

Zesty hasn't been converted at all, but we're definitely planning on putting its features into core2 as part of the conversion process.

[matgb]

Aye, I just saw that in the Styles post and did a little happy jig. I'm using base Core2 now, trying to figure out what I want to add to it (and how), the basic code is very well laid out (ie, I understand it), I just don't know how to override bits (yet).

I'll get there.

[aveleh]

Yes, you will \o/

One of the things we're trying to do is move forward and make core2 more awesome so that most people won't have to override it, and can instead set properties to get the functionality they want. Basically, make it so that you'll override a few functions to get some different HTML ordering, but leave the logic alone :) If you're interested at doing any patches to help with this, let me know and I'll point you in the right direction.

[matgb]

I'm currently working on 'share this' codes to put icons for sites like delicious &c into the footer of a post, but I also want free text areas in the sidebar and similar.

So yeah, definitely interested. It's the very basic "how to override" something that I'm actually completely stuck on, can't find owt in the wiki and I never could figure it out in LJ.

zesty not displaying properly

[hhw]

afuna suggested I note this here: I just switched my account style to zesty white, but it's not displaying as intended, I don't think. Here's a screen cap, from before I found the "expand all" option:

http://pics.livejournal.com/hhw/pic/0001tpaz

with "expand all" the formatting is the same, just with entry text instead of without.

I am able to see other journals using zesty white with what I assume is the intended format (the_shoshanna.dreamdwidth.org for example).

My guess (based on no actual knowledge of how the site works) is that this is related to my having open ID status rather than a real dreamwidth account.

Re: zesty not displaying properly

[smallbeer.livejournal.com]

I'm having the same kind of problem using zesty on my OpenID reading page.

[beck_liz]

The weird thing that I've noticed about Zesty is regarding those link boxes at the top for Recent, Profile, etc. The thing I've discovered is that you can't right click on them and have, say, your profile open in a new window. You can click on them, but then it takes you away from your journal or read page.

However, it occurs to me that this may be a problem with my browser. At home, I'm using up-to-date browsers (Firefox and IE), and I haven't tested this issue in those newer browsers. At work, however, they haven't upgraded IE from version 6 yet. Would that make a difference?

Playing around with Zesty

[aithine]

Here are a few things I've noticed while playing around with the zesty white style. :)

• don't automatically add punctuation in the subheader/entry title display at the top of the page (example why not)
• the journal title should link back to main account page
• does the header really need to take up a third of the page?
• remove the calendar links at the bottom of the reading page - all it does is cause confusion
• the calendar font is nearly unreadable - very, very, very light grey on white? even when there entries, it's still hard to read
• needs a customize colors option on the journal customization section
• there are no edit/memory/tag/etc links/icons on mode=reply page
• four of the six navigation links can be renamed, but not tags or memories