Ch-ch-changes

[alchemy]

Hi guys! I'm Anita, and I'm your new maintainer here at dreamwidthlayouts. I inherited this responsibility from the ever-fabulous grrliz, who wasn't able to keep up with the community anymore.

I'm going to be making some minor changes to the community just to ensure it's more functional for both layout makers and layout users. On the agenda:

1. Establish a list of standard tags to make browsing easier. I'm thinking tags for style (Tabula Rasa, etc) as well as type (Simple, etc.), feature (# of columns, custom header, etc) and color. Are there any other kind of tags you would find useful? (I see that Liz took a survey about tags last year, but I'd like to ask again since it's been so long.)


2. Establish a standard format for posting layouts to the community so that users can see at a glance what sort of layout it is. What information would you guys like included on the form?


3. A custom layout for the community. If I were to have a contest, would any of you actually submit designs?

Your feedback on the above and the community is GREATLY appreciated. While we do have several folks posting fairly frequently (And we LOVE them ♥), I think it's fair to say that if we're members of this community, we agree that it's past time for us to get a lot more custom layouts available for DW. I want to encourage that in any way I can.

Thanks!

Comments

[foxfirefey]

I think Liz set it up before a Dreamwidth communication fubar. At the time, our styles were REALLY paltry. Just desolate. So most people had imported core1 styles. And when open beta came, we cut off the ability for free accounts to manipulate layers, and, er, misstep. They couldn't edit the layers they had and there weren't many styles to choose from.

So yes, even free users can have one set of layers to play around with!

What I mean by just tweaking is, let's say there's a style and I like it for the most part but just tweak one part of it. Like, let's say I used CSS to make the comments of a post's author stand out (totally possible using the CSS classes available)--sharing that snippet of CSS, but it's not really a new layout so much as a tweak that could be combined with other tweaks.

[alchemy]

Oh, okay! I didn't know free users got a set of layers, awesome. The more you know~

And I think offering snippets of code would be GREAT. Personally, I love the idea of people sharing their knowledge. I would love to see tutorials, too.

[foxfirefey]

Sweet! In that case, we'd want tags for snippets and full layouts. Suggestions for links:

http://wiki.dwscoalition.org/notes/S2_Guide
http://wiki.dwscoalition.org/notes/S2_CSS
style_system
dw_styles
dreamscapes

[musyc]

I love the code snippet idea. Often I'll see a layout that has only one part I'll want to use - I was pleased as punch to see someone put in drop shadows, frex, because I thought that was awesome, but I didn't want the rest of the layout. Snippets would be faboo.

[auroraprimavera]

Ditto to this.

[baggyeyes]

Code snippet idea is great--that would be fantastic for dreamscapes and dw_styles as well. Maybe a library of code?

[foxfirefey]

Here seems like the best place for it---dreamscapes is for styles that are moving to be included in the style system, and dw_styles is more for announcements/development.