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

[shirou]

First let me say that I really like this style. However, I think it's a little weird that the calendar module title (April 2009) is centered, whereas all the other module titles (eg Profile, Links) are left aligned. It seems like all the module titles should have the same alignment. (My preference would be that they all be centered.)

My apologies if someone has mentioned this already. I looked through the comments and didn't see anything about it.

[writinginct]

I second this - aligning them all one way or the other would be awesome. It's a little jarring that the calendar is the only one centered.

But have to add- this is a great style! It's very clean and easy to read which I like.

[afuna]

Thanks for the report! I've entered it into the system.