Styles: add new sorting categories to Select Journal Style

[ninetydegrees]

Title:
Styles: add new sorting categories to Select Journal Style

Area:
styles

Summary:
The number of styles/themes growing steadily (there are well over 200 now), it's become quite difficult to find a style you like, especially for newcomers. I believe additional sidebar categories would help.

Description:
I also believe it should be done before there are so many styles it'll make the devs want to tear all their hair out. ;)

Suggested categories:

-- high contrast/low contrast

-- light on dark, dark on light

-- with images / without images

-- one column, two columns, three columns

-- dominating color = blue, red, green, yellow, orange, brown, purple, black, white, beige, gray (this is inspired by the Threadless shop).

-- simple / fancy (I'm thinking of styles with many borders or shadows or images, vs styles with plainer looking boxes or fewer boxes). This might be hard to define so I'm not sure about this one.

-- styles where you can display banners (many styles let you easily have header background images but not banners unless you know CSS)

Poll #4425 Styles: add new sorting categories to Select Journal Style

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 53

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
40 (75.5%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
3 (5.7%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
0 (0.0%)

(I have no opinion)
10 (18.9%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[ratcreature]

I like more browsing options, but I'm not sure columns make sense. I thought all styles could have more or fewer columns?

[zvi]

There are a couple of one-column styles, but, in the general case, they are column-flexible.

[ninetydegrees]

Many styles don't support three columns and a couple don't support two columns. All styles are supposed to support one column but a few don't yet.

[cesy]

I think counting that as a bug and fixing it would be more to the point than having a set of columns categories, but all the other categories are great.

[ninetydegrees]

One column's a bug. The other ones aren't. I'm not sure it's possible for all styles. Also, considering nobody's worked on it recently but me (and I'm doing other things now) I don't think this is going to happen any time soon so cats in the meantime would be useful. I know it's the first thing I look for in a style and I find it's currently lacking.

[liv]

I'm happy to make one and three column versions of all the base styles, if that would be a useful thing for me to do?

[ninetydegrees]

It would definitely be, I believe. :) There's a table summing up which style has what in the Dreamscapes spreadsheet. Bug for one-column is #1798. The only other one I'm working on is Bases 2CL.

[thorfinn]

Can styles be tagged? (I honestly have no idea, I have not spent any time whatsoever with style editing etc.)

If not, tags good, fixed categories hohum :-)

[ninetydegrees]

Tagged by users? No.

[cesy]

Tagged by developers, I think, so they can be in both "high contrast" and "two column" and "blue", rather than one or the other.

[ninetydegrees]

Oh that can be done. We currently have two cats/tags - 'featured' and 'base' - so it's just a matter of creating more and 'tagging' themes with them.

[thorfinn]

Yep! And then presumably whatever it takes to then display/collect/search styles relating to those tags in an organised way should just work.

Again, I actually have no idea how that works at present, I'm just assuming that there is probably stuff that can either be relatively trivially turned on and/or already works.

[ninetydegrees]

It doesn't work with Search right now. Good idea. I'll edit the suggestion.

Edit: well it doesn't need to work with Search actually since the cats are displayed in the sidebar.

[thorfinn]

Neato. :-)

Might pay to pop up something in dw_styles asking about what kinds of tagging people would find useful, so that you can make a good set of tags and sub-tags to begin with. Good thing is you can always add more later if you need.

The above list sounds pretty good already for a start.

I actually like the simple/fancy thing.

Maybe a tag set about background pictures/textures?

[ninetydegrees]

Good thinking. I'm sure this will be noted in implementation notes.

Another user and I have already made such lists at getting_started and one list which was asked for was styles where you can have a header image (I guess they meant an image above the header not a background image) so I'll add this.

[thorfinn]

Ah! Yes, tags for where you can put pictures, so you can find styles by where you like to put pictures... And maybe a tag for "no pictures" for the peeps that really hate picture styles. :-)

[thorfinn]

*nod* Tags are, IMO, the right solution. Probably not full arbitrary tagging by any user, but a curated set of tags that can then be applied by style creators and/or the style team...

[ninetydegrees]

Ok then: http://dw-suggestions.dreamwidth.org/432441.html?thread=2620729#cmt2620729

:)

[kyrielle]

+1