Meet the Styles Wizard! (needs testing)

I wrote up some info about using the styles wizard, because the last big discussion we had on styles showed that a lot of people didn't realize all of the things that you can do just with the wizard. I wrote up this walk through, but, at this point, I can't tell if it (a) makes sense or (b) is useful.

Let me know if there's anything too confusing or that's really unnecessary, let me know if there are any blatant errors. I'll post it to getting_started once I'm satisfied with it, and offer it to the docs team as the basis of a guide. (I don't write for official Dreamwidth docs because the official style guide has some stylistic decisions I can't support.)

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A good while ago, there was a discussion about how to organize Select Styles. Reading that discussion was pretty disheartening, because so much of what people were asking for is already available with most official styles.

I'm going to walk you through selecting a style, so you can see how you can use the style selector to choose a theme and use the wizard to make a style your own.

( A few introductory notes )

( Picking a layout )

I'm going to use Tabula Rasa as the example for walking through the wizard. As I said above, 95% of the styles implement 95% or more of the options I discuss below. Some of the styles have extra options, a few of the styles have fewer options, and none of this applies to Zesty.

( We're Off to See The Wizard )

That's the basics of what you need to know to modify your style. As you can see, a lot of the ways people would like to search for styles don't apply (e.g. columns, modules available) don't apply, because they are selectable through the wizard or they are standardized for all of the styles.

There is one option people are very interested in which is dependent on style. Unfortunately, we don't have a way to search to tell you where in the entry the style displays the icon. There is a bug to make left or right side of entry something one can select in all approved styles, but it's slow going because the CSS can be fairly complicated and we haven't made people submitting new styles supply this feature.

The other option people expressed interest in searching for was fixed width versus flexible width. All of the official styles are fluid width layouts.

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One thing people expressed an interest in doing that the style system makes somewhat difficult to do is preserving a particular set of wizard changes. There is a way to (more or less) do that, but it is a hack and requires being a little bit adventurous.

( How to save the Wizard )

( Some vocabulary. )