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 :)
frangipani: a stenciled sign on a wall saying: no drowning (no drowning)

[personal profile] frangipani 2009-04-20 02:54 pm (UTC)(link)
I want to apologise in advance if I'm confusing people, because I honestly don't know what a lot of the design elements/style thingies are called. *wrings hands* I can't find an answer to my main question in previous posts, but please direct me to it if you have.

Will we be able to customise the core2 styles so that our comment pages are viewable in the default (or our otherwise chosen) site scheme? I don't mean viewing in the "light" format, as that doesn't fulfill the reasons why I prefer viewing a comment page in the site scheme (and in any case the navigation strip has always been irritatingly intrusive to me, even in LJ). I find it extremely frustrating not to be able to access the horizontal menu bar so that I can immediately click over to my recent entries, reading page, and memories. This is especially useful when, say, I'm following a multi-part story and want to check if I've added an earlier part to my memories. It's just really handy.
Edited 2009-04-20 14:56 (UTC)
afuna: Cat under a blanket. Text: "Cats are just little people with Fur and Fangs" (Default)

[personal profile] afuna 2009-04-20 04:42 pm (UTC)(link)
Oh yes, definitely. The properties lacking in the Transmogrified wizard was an oversight. If you're comfortable with theme layers/user layers, you can put this line in:

set use_journalstyle_entry_page=false;

(And we'll try to fix up the wizard ASAP)
frangipani: photo of frangipani flowers (Default)

[personal profile] frangipani 2009-04-22 06:46 am (UTC)(link)
Thank you!