Transmogrified! And notes on the style overhaul.

[aveleh]

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 absolut for the LiveJournal Style Contest in 2005. Most of the legwork on getting it to work with core2 was done by dani_the_girl and draigwen, who have been working with afuna, av8rmike, jadelennox, liv and rich. This style has really gentle default colours, and is a great option to have. You can see it in action at 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 :)

Comments

[kate_nepveu]

I apologize if this is not the right place for this.

I love the ability to append nc=[number of comments] to the URL for the comment pages, so that it changes color back to unread when a new comment is received. I think this used to be a checkbox in LJ, but I suspect it ought to be a style option now, except I can't find it in LJ . . . so I'm not sure where to look for it here.

Anyway, I miss it, and if it's possible to put it in a style, I would love that.

[spiralsheep]

I think that might be a browser widgety/scripty thing. Are you using Firefox?

[kate_nepveu]

No, I'm pretty sure that's not, because I use Opera and (a) people don't make stuff like that for us => and (b) I just cleaned out my userjs directory anyway and there's nothing there that would cause that.

[afuna]

Viewing setting:

http://www.dreamwidth.org/manage/settings/?cat=display#LJ__Setting__StyleMine_stylemine

Set that, and it'll affect all styles :)

D'oh. Not that one. Let me see if I can remember how to do it.

[kate_nepveu]

At least it's not just me who isn't sure how it's done any more! Thanks.

[afuna]

Okay, it looks like the one page you can set it is in http://dreamwidth.org/settings/?tag=links, and that page is currently broken.

[kate_nepveu]

Heh. I was just coming back to say that I finally found it on LJ -- http://www.livejournal.com/settings/?tag=comment -- and via a suggestions post that it be linked and documented, so no wonder!

Thanks for looking into it, and filing a bug report too!

adding nc=xx in S2 (old version)

[kate_nepveu]

If anyone is still using an S2 style with

$this->print_readlink();

in it to generate the link to comments, just before that, put

function CommentInfo::print_readlink {
var Page p = get_page();
"<a href=\"$.read_url?nc=$.count#comments\">"+
get_plural_phrase($.count, $p.view == "read" ?
"text_read_comments_friends" : "text_read_comments")+
"</a>";
}

(This will also let you jump straight to the comments section of the resulting page. Remove "#comments" to stop that behavior.)

(This assumes you don't want "?style=mine" for entries off your reading past. If you do, you want &nc=, except DW won't add ?style=mine to links to your _own_ entries from your reading page, so it'll break for your own entries; so hard-code in the ?style=mine&nc=$.count after $.read_url.)

It looks like this has been replaced by "print_interaction_links" in DW's upgraded S2, though, so I don't think you can affect the printing of links in the layer itself.

My extremely ugly, hacked-together cargo-cult layer is here: http://www.dreamwidth.org/customize/advanced/layersource.bml?id=10424