Tips and Tricks

[denise]

jjhunter suggested a section in a future news post from layout/theme designers about Nifty Things You Can Do Through The Wizard To Personalize Your Style. Anybody got any ideas of what we can do for that? Anybody want to volunteer to compile them?

Comments

[momijizukamori]

-change colors (the obvious one *g*)
-change fonts! (this will hopefully be easier in the future as I quietly campaign for more webfont support). But at the very least, you can mix up serif and sans-serif fonts to decent effect in header vs body text
-add images! most of the layouts support a bunch of different background imageds, and places like photobucket and imgur will let you link stuff there. There's a list of background patterns on dreamscapes here - even just using one page background image can change things up a bit (for ex, onifukuchou, which is Marginless with a background image and some custom colors.
-Change modules around! Disable ones you don't use, change the order of ones you do - particularly if you like having your main content take up most of the space, and want to use one of the one-column modes

[ninetydegrees]

-- The obvious but easily overlooked one because the previews always show the same one: change your page set up.

-- display tags as multilevel (and using them in the first place!) both in module and tags page.

-- using simple CSS to change something in your whole style with !important. For example: a { text-decoration: underline !important; }

-- new options: adding hover text on links list, editing module headings and displaying content in reverse-chronological order on archive pages.

-- using HTML in the custom text module to add images, links, etc.

-- oh one more: displaying the calendar horizontally (works much better in one-column modes)

[musyc]

-- Make sidebar/entries columns wider or smaller in px or whatever!

... I thought I had more, but they've been covered above. XD

[snowpuppies]

Changing the margins always works for me, and can really make a difference in the look.

[turlough]

How easy it is to change from the standard flexible width to the fixed width that so many people prefer.

[momijizukamori]

On most of the layouts, it requires CSS (which I can't quote off-hand, unfortunately, but I can dig it up if it's wanted). They all define the content area as 'whatever's left over after the margins are taken away' which means that if the page size changes (not maximized, different computer, etc), content-width changes. I actually created Heads Up specificially to address this (and adding big banner images into headers) - it's afaik the only layout we have that defines itself by content width, which can be a percentage of the page, a width in ems, or a width in px.

[turlough]

And of course Heads Up is the only DW style I've worked with. No wonder I was suprised at how easy it was to make fixed width. (All styles should be that easy!)

[murderthoughts]

It miiiight be a possibility, though it takes some hacking at core2 to get it to align pefectly with the header image. The big problem is that if you have options for content width and for margin width, 1) that is a kindof confusing set of options and 2) if someone sets them to things that don't match things will get hideously broken fast.

[momijizukamori]

...Way to go self, posting that comment on the wrong journal like a boss.