Come up with something awesome? Submit it to dreamscapes!

[denise]

bzzinglikeneon gave me permission to post a reminder here: if you're posting your awesome new style or theme to dreamwidthlayouts, please also consider submitting it to dreamscapes, which is the community for submitting layout layers and theme layers to Dreamwidth for conversion and addition to the available system choices at the Select Journal Style area. You can submit either new styles or themes for existing styles.

The submission guidelines go into detail about what we need for a system style in terms of browser compatability, design guidelines, etc. You can submit new styles as either S2 layers, or as a CSS stylesheet to be applied against an existing style. (For best and fastest results in getting a whole new style added to the site, S2 layer submission is easiest for us; second easiest is a CSS stylesheet to be applied against the Tabula Rasa style, which is designed to have no real styling itself but serves as a CSS-classed "blank slate" like the CSS Zen Garden project.)

When submitting a style to us for inclusion on the site, we ask that you send us a Contributor Licensing Agreement, or CLA. This agreement explicitly gives us a non-exclusive license to redistribute your work (both on dreamwidth.org itself and as part of our open source codebase) and protects you by explicitly stating that you keep all the intellectual property inherent in your design: you aren't signing over your work, you're just letting us use it.

Things get a little more complex if you're including any images that you didn't make yourself; any images you use in a design you submit for official use need to be licensed under terms that allow us to use and redistribute it. If you aren't sure, we'll do the checking on that for you: just be sure to include information on where you got the image when you make the submission.

To help reward people who contribute styles and themes, we have a Dreamwidth Points bounty on all submissons: when a style or theme you create is added to the site, you'll receive 30 points per theme, and 90 points per style.

Right now we're particularly looking for holiday themes of all types -- secular, religious, national, seasonal, etc. But we'd love to see anything you come up with!

If you've got any questions, feel free to ask me! I really love a lot of the creative themes and styles we've been seeing here in dreamwidthlayouts, and I'd love to be able to add them as system styles.

Comments

[momijizukamori]

SO I WAS TOTALLY GOING TO DO A POST LIKE THIS so awesome I don't have. But basically, I'm willing to volunteer to help strip and patch layouts because I am not much of a designer, but I'm pretty good with the code :)

[liv]

This is possibly reopening a can of worms, but is there any possibility we could consider having any fixed width official styles? I know they are not accessible and can cause problems with font resizing, but at the same time, lots and lots of people really want them. The reason is that there are loads of cute tricks you can do with graphics and CSS that just don't work with fluid styles. (Pretty much everything in the CSS Zen Garden repository you link, for example: those designs can't be adapted for official DW styles because they depend on fixed width elements.)

When we get newcomers to the site complaining that there aren't any good styles here, some of us are like, wtf, there are nearly 500 layouts available, surely you can't hate all of them. But I get the impression that what people are complaining about is that there aren't any fixed width layouts. Which means that they can't have a header image or navigation banner which aligns pixel-perfect with the main entries column.

I can submit this as a formal suggestion for debate if you'd like, but what I'm thinking is something like, have a style clearly labelled as fixed width. Make it available in a range of screen resolutions / font sizes. That would give the real CSS stars a better canvas to work on, hopefully without compromising accessibility too much (especially as we already have 500 fluid width styles available). And I've noticed that the release-88 refugees community has some really awesome designers; it would be great if we could get some of their contributions worked up into official layouts!

The other thing about this proposal is that it would make a big dent in the amount of time volunteers spend helping people who insist on using Flexible Squares or Mixit/Expressive based layouts on DW. That was fine as a stop-gap measure when DW only had three layouts, but now the two sites have diverged so much, it is consuming a lot of effort, both on the Support board and in unofficial communities. It would be really nice if there were at least one DW-native base layout as appealing to layout designers as FlexiSquares and Expressive!

[momijizukamori]

A thought - it might be possible to code a layout that is fluid by default but has the option of allowing users to specify a fixed width in the options setting. I'll have to poke at the code and see if it's easy to do, though. But that'd solve the header image problem for users who just want that.

For CSS designers, though, it's really trivial to make elements fixed width. The base CSS for all of the Tabula Rasa-descended layouts (which is a good chunk of them) is insanely flexible - I could probably whip up a Flexible Squares or Expressive clone in an hour.

I think some of the complaints are due to the fact that while we have a lot of bases, a lot of them are fairly similar in look, which I think is in part because not a ton of people submit style layers, which means in turn that the bases reflect the personal styles of a small handful of designers.

[momijizukamori]

And fu has told me that my header-image friendly coding idea is totally possible, so congratulations, you gave me a new project XD

[erinptah]

It's certainly possible to specify fixed-width elements within the CSS of one of the current fluid styles. My current layout is running on Tabula Rasa, and has a mod of a fixed-width Wordpress layout that works fine: the #canvas and #header widths are set to 760px, the #secondary width to 140px, and the #entry-wrap width to 305px, with margins tweaked to make them line up with the background image.

For users who aren't up to diving into CSS themselves, I feel like it shouldn't be too hard to let people set column widths through a Customize Your Theme tab.