Add complete pre-filled custom s2 template for beginners on the Wiki.

[marahmarie]

Title:
Add complete pre-filled custom s2 template for beginners on the Wiki.

Area:
Styles

Summary:
Add a complete, pre-filled custom s2 template on the Wiki for Dreamwidth s2 beginners that anyone can edit to add more example code as desired, to help users help themselves to more customized code without necessarily having to ask for help in one of the style communities or hunt down the exact page containing the code they want in the Wiki.

Description:
Ever wonder how to add something not given to you out of the box on your Dreamwidth journal, like an extra row of links in your DW's header or a second custom text box in your sidebar? So have I. The answer is you need a custom theme layer to add Dreamwidth's s2 code to - and you need to know or else figure out the right chunks of s2 code to add to it. By adding the right chunks of code you can make different things on your journal like the extra custom text box or basically almost anything that won't automatically be stripped out by the s2 compiler.

For the most part, if I have a question about how to write the correct code to pull off one of my latest ideas, I'll ask for expert help over in our style_system community and most of the time I'll receive excellent answers and help with all of the code wrangling needed. But not everyone is willing to wait on asking others for help and/or learning to any extent how the code works (or why it doesn't); they just want the shiny and to teach themselves the code for it (or ask for help in learning it) as they go along - maybe later, or maybe never.

The question in one's mind at this juncture may be, "Why should there be this big code hurdle for me to jump just to get at some of the shiny"?

So my suggestion toward this is based on our s2 Cookbook which is kept here: http://wiki.dwscoalition.org/wiki/index.php/S2_Cookbook

My idea is to keep the separate pages we already have on the wiki for adding modules (http://wiki.dwscoalition.org/wiki/index.php/S2_Cookbook:_Modules), making the heading work as a link (http://wiki.dwscoalition.org/wiki/index.php/S2_Cookbook:_Linking_the_title_on_your_journal_to_your_main_journal_page) and so on, and to add more pages for other similar functions as needed, but to also add a new page that shows all of that code and more working together at once, starting from the opening lines (which are generally something like, "layerinfo "type" = "theme"; layerinfo "name" = "layer name";") for a sort of One Stop Shop where you can choose which bits of code you want for what or compile the entire thing to see how it all works and looks together at once.

With the code properly commented, it will be easy to see if any part of the code does what you need it to do and by reading the code under each comment you might get a sense of how it's doing what it does. For anything beyond that you can always still ask in the style communities for extra help.

Maybe this new Wiki page could be called "All known custom s2 functions adapted by our users - on one page!" and could be found under the "S2 Cookbook: Other Examples" heading, and be clearly marked as an example of how much each journal can be modified to do more interesting things and offer more interesting features. Anyone could contribute to it, so say if you learned in one of the style communities how to add extra previous and next links beyond what a standard DW offers out of the box (http://style-system.dreamwidth.org/108697.html), you could add the finalized code on that page to this new Wiki (besides giving it its own page on the Wiki like a few other functions already have) so others can see it as part of a complete example custom theme layer.

Poll #16807 Add complete pre-filled custom s2 template for beginners on the Wiki.

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 24

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This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
14 (58.3%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
0 (0.0%)

(I have no opinion)
9 (37.5%)

(Other: please comment)
1 (4.2%)

Comments

[cesy]

Why does this need a suggestions entry? Anyone can add pages to the wiki, surely?

[marahmarie]

That's not really the point. At the time I wrote this suggestion (which was a while back, honestly) I think I was thinking of ways to make it easier for Support and volunteer help communities like style_system to help other users. I think the thought just popped into my head "Wouldn't it be nice if we could come up with a pre-made template with the most commonly requested advanced features" (and even code that is not so commonly requested) so that instead of answering the same questions again and again with the same code or directing users to the same handful of people who know how to write the code that's needed, we could just point to this new page on the wiki and say, "Here's the code you were looking for" or "Check here and if you don't see what you need or something similar enough to it to pass, then let us know so we can help you more." And in my overall enthusiasm around that idea I did not know exactly how best to make it reach as many experienced s2 code writers on Dreamwidth as possible, which I think is how it came to be a suggestion.