aveleh: Close up picture of a vibrantly coloured lime (Default)
abby ([personal profile] aveleh) wrote in [site community profile] dw_styles2009-04-19 05:29 pm

Transmogrified! And notes on the style overhaul.

We're still going through old comments to add bugs into the ticket tracker, but there will be some top-level posts in between working on replies. I promise someone will get to everyone :)

With the last code push, a new style "Transmogrified" is now live. This layout was designed by [livejournal.com profile] absolut for the LiveJournal Style Contest in 2005. Most of the legwork on getting it to work with core2 was done by [personal profile] dani_the_girl and [personal profile] draigwen, who have been working with [personal profile] afuna, [personal profile] av8rmike, [personal profile] jadelennox, [personal profile] liv and [personal profile] rich. This style has really gentle default colours, and is a great option to have. You can see it in action at [site community profile] dw_styles or Select it as your Journal Style.

With beta opening up, now's the ideal time to talk about more about "the styles overhaul." In order to ensure that Dreamwidth styles are more accessible, easier to write, and easier to update, a number of volunteers have been working together over the last few months to complete a significant overhaul of various styles and the core code that powers them. Until open-beta, our priority is working to ensure that core and individual styles are working as expected, and then after that, we'll be able to start adding new features. And, wow, are there ever a lot of features we're going to be able to add!

One of our goals is that users will never have to choose a style because of the functionality it offers. Instead, you can choose a style because you prefer the way that it lays out items on your journal. So, options like "put icons on the left side of each entry" would be a per-style option. But we think that options like "only display the mini-calendar on the Recent Items page" should be available on all styles, and style designers should never have to write new code to implement it.

The way we're accomplishing this is to remove these options from each individual style, make sure that the basics are working in each style, and then start adding awesome new features to core2. I know this means that things are a little sparse and frustrating during the beta process. But this is really going to help the long-term growth of the style-system and make it easier to update old styles and write new styles.

I also wanted to add a reminder that if you're moving S2 styles over from other LiveJournal-based sites, you probably want to use core1, because that version of core is (almost) the same and is more likely to produce expected results :)
kerravonsen: Yin-Yang symbol, black and rainbow-sparkles (yin-yang)

[personal profile] kerravonsen 2009-04-19 11:38 pm (UTC)(link)
♥ Transmogrified!

However, there's one thing I've noticed in comments pages using Transmogrified; icon handling is a little flaky.
a) if the comment is from an openID user, the icon appears below the subject instead of next to it.
b) there is always a huge gap between comments whether there is an icon next to the subject or not. I mean, obviously, when the icon is there, the gap is needed, but when there isn't an icon there, it looks strange.
hatman: HatMan, my alter ego and face on the 'net (Default)

[personal profile] hatman 2009-04-26 01:39 am (UTC)(link)
OpenID thing seems to be a known issue. A patch is in the works. Thanks for pointing it out. :)

Is the other thing still an issue?
kerravonsen: (Default)

[personal profile] kerravonsen 2009-04-26 03:40 am (UTC)(link)
Is the other thing still an issue?
Yes, there are still gaps between comments when a comment lacks an icon. I notice this with my imported entries where there are lots of OpenID comments, and the person in question hasn't made an OpenID account, or hasn't uploaded icons to their OpenID account, so there are no icons available to show for that comment. So whether this is an icon thing or an OpenID thing, I don't know. I suppose one could test it with an account which has no default icon set, and post a comment which uses "default" for its icon.
hatman: HatMan, my alter ego and face on the 'net (Default)

[personal profile] hatman 2009-04-26 03:57 am (UTC)(link)
Yeah, could well be an OpenID issue. There's an issue with the way CSS (the style sheet system) treats OpenID comments. Like I said, it's a known issue, and a patch is in the works.