CSS Facelift

[vvrenn]

Hello lovely people!

I'm not sure if this is the right place to post and/or inquire about this, so feel free to correct me if I'm straying where I do not belong.

I was wondering, are there any plans for a visual "uplift" (so to speak) with the site's CSS and mobile compatibility?

I have made the decision to leave LiveJournal, but I am admittedly a bit sad that I had to leave that slick-looking interface over there behind. Not bashing at all, I'm vastly more appreciative of DreamWidth and everything it stands for. And I also realize there are way more important issues that must be worked on. Just wanted to see if anything is in the works. TIA!

Comments

[mark]

I don't think we have any active plans to revamp the core site scheme's overall look, although there's always ongoing improvements to various bits and pieces.

So it depends on what page you're on. We have been working on making more commonly used parts of the site more friendly to mobile! but not everything is there yet.

[azurelunatic]

So there's an ongoing project to convert the crufty old Brad-era pages to be built in a slightly more modern way, though I'm not sure what percentage of the site that project is right now. There are a couple of people doing a page or so at a time; right now someone's tackling the inbox.

You may be interested in beta testing some of the upgrades in progress; you can turn that on at https://www.dreamwidth.org/beta

Site skins are at https://www.dreamwidth.org/manage/settings/?cat=display#skin

[denise]

Welcome to the neighborhood, we're really glad to have you!

As Mark and Azz already touched on, we're working with a lot of limitations -- there's a lot more we could be doing with responsive design, small viewport improvements, etc, but we're stuck in the hell that is modernizing the code first: half the pages you see on the site are still generated by the old "BML" templating language that Brad first came up with in 1996 for his project before LiveJournal. As you would expect from something that was invented in 1996 and not really updated much since then, it lacks like 95% of the features that a modern templating language has. We've been in a literal decade-long process of converting those pages over to using a more modern system, but it's such a leap that it's incredibly slow going, especially because a) it's tedious work that doesn't involve much potential for fun stuff so people do it a small chunk at a time and then get tired of it for a while and b) it's such a change that it's very hard to get things looking similar to how they used to and people get very irritated if too much stuff changes all at once. We have a lot of the minor areas of the site converted by now, but the bigger stuff (Azz mentioned the inbox as the current major project) is a lot harder and involves a lot of un-fun UX problems.

We're definitely open to somebody with strong design and UX skills coming up with a fresher site skin, but the half-done state of the conversion means that it's a much harder thing than it sounds like it should be: because half the site is still using the ancient crufty templating system, it's definitely not as easy as "make a few CSS tweaks". Most of the attention these days is going to the conversion problems: if that's something you would be interested in doing we can point you at where to start! (Everything that's in /htdocs that ends in .bml still needs converting, plus I think a few other things that live outside that directory.) The biggest things left other than the inbox are the settings pages, the customize-your-journal pages, the shop, the support area, the account creation workflow, and the home page, all of which are going to be (to use the technical term) a pain in the fucking ass because they're complicated pages with complicated logic and the potential for some UX and accessibility disasters. We're getting there! But it's slow going.