Styles team introduction, and introduction to the overhaul

[aveleh]

I wanted to start by introducing the ( styles team )

When afuna and I talk about specific changes in the styles overhaul, we try to ensure that we’re making the experience better for all users who want to change the way their journal works.. In general, we try to keep these five different ways of interacting with the styles system in mind:

1. People who want to use the wizard to change the look of their style


2. People who want to use CSS to change the look of their style


3. People who want to use the advanced customization area and tutorials to change their style


4. People who want to write their own styles


5. People who want to write their own styles and don’t like standardizations

( Here are some of the ways we’re working on making the experience better for each of those groups )

In the short term, you'll notice a few negatives. The most notable one will be that that some options that came with a style have been removed. This is so that those that can, are implemented in core and then easily rolled out to all styles. (Those that can't will eventually have the functionality put back in, taking advantage of other code changes.) In the long term, this will mean a lot of positives, for everyone.

Styles overhaul: stage one

[aveleh]

For the last few months, one of the quiet projects that has been going on is an overhaul of the styles system on Dreamwidth. The styles system for LiveJournal code is mostly very powerful, but there are a number of problems associated with it. Most of these problems can only be fixed by breaking things first, which is what we've been doing.

( Somewhat technical ramblings: )

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What all this means:
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If you aren't using a customized style, you may have noticed that the ugly and plain style you've been forced to use has now been replaced with a... still ugly and plain style, but one that has more functionality. This is our first draft of core2, the underlying code that is used to power all the other styles that are coming your way. We aim to have a stable building block with which to build other styles; styles won't have to create a lot of functionality from scratch each time.

The draft you're using doesn't have any wizard functionality, so you can't add headers or change background colours or make any of a million tweaks that will be standard. There will be features that you don't use that are showing up, that later you'll be able to remove them. And things that are ugly. But you guys all know this is beta :) So, please, poke at it, poke at journals, poke at communities, poke at syndicated feeds. If you're on the beta team, please follow your usual bug reporting procedures as per domtheknight. If you're not, please contact me (I like IRC) or denise for further instruction regarding any problems you find.

Current known issues (more edited in as reported):

• ugly


• No wizard


• CSS incomplete


• HTML not validated on all views


• Two "tags" listings in sidebar - this is because one is to display multi-level tags. Multi-level tags are a change in display, only. Use : as a separator between words in your tags to make use of this feature.


• openID user URLs in the sidebar overlap with the rest of the page text. Have to decide whether to make really wide sidebars, or do something else with the usernames.


• On the Reading page sidebar, usernames are printed for users posting in communities, but not for users printing in their own journal.


• On the Reading page sidebar, usernames are printed for users posting in communities, but not the community name.


• On communities that you can manage tags, the "Manage Tags" link under the "Tags" modules will not appear, as S2 has no way of knowing who can manage tags.


• On the month view, entries that have links will not work as expected. Instead, the HTML in the subject should be stripped and printed plain, and then linked to the entry.


• The Month module shouldn't be displayed when viewing an openid's reading page


• Unclosed h3 tag on the Day Page

Some example things to be expected:

• You should be able to perform the same "user interactions menu" options on any journal page as you can on the profile page. This means adding and/or modifying your circle relationships, posting to a journal, and tracking entries. If you see something different, report it. If the text describing the action is incorrect, report it.


• There are two linkbars for working on your entries, one for "edit entry, edit tags, add to memories, track this" and one for "x comments, leave a comment". Each link should only display to a user who can do that specific action. If you see something different, report it. If the action is describing the action is incorrect, report it.


• etc, etc