What are the best ways to roll out styled icon/profile pages?

[foxfirefey]

So, one of the projects Styles has been working on is custom icon and profile pages. The stunning exor674 has implemented a backend for custom icon pages; after we implement them for all styles, we will be working on custom profile pages.

One of the concerns is that a good amount of people are going to not see icon pages--and especially profile pages, which are difficult enough to do effectively without shoehorning them into a style--in styles. But we don't want to multiply too many options. Possible strategies are:

• Add a separate display option for icon and profile pages, or just profile pages since icon pages are far less likely to be troublesome in styles.


• Don't add any options. All styles will have the ability to display icon and profile pages in the site style, just like entry pages. Somebody who doesn't want to view them can use the style=mine sticky display and set them thus. This will not satisfy the people who don't want to set display options for style=mine, but it's probably the fewest options.


• Hooking them up to the entry display option--probably not a good idea.
• Hooking them up to the journal display option--also not a good idea, since few people will be using the site view for their journal.

Other ideas welcome!

Comments

[archangelbeth]

I think I understood it pretty well, and I think I agree with your points. Icons are mostly used by the person who put 'em there; people looking at your icons are not going to be seeking standardized data (except for the icon data itself!). People looking at a profile will be looking for specific things, which should be in standardized places.

[matgb]

Exactly. Having said that, I'd hope although haven't looked that everything will remain in standard places on a styles profile page, it'll just have my style surrounding it instead of site chrome.

My approach generally is that everything that's matgb.dreamwidth.org/whatever is mine and should look like it's part of the same site--search engines will treat my icon page and profile page as part of my site, not DW, so they should look like they're part of it.

But I can see many people wanting to be able to find key data quickly that are used to the site chrome anyway, thus a profile page should always have a clear option to be in sitescheme to logged in users (That's in the navstrip I think but...)

[pauamma]

By"icon data", do you mean keywords, comment, and description? (I'm not sure what other useful data there is on that page, except perhaps the number of icons.)

[archangelbeth]

The icon itself, keyword, comment, and description, yes. And at that, the keyword, comment, and description can probably move around a bit, so long as it's clustered pretty close to the icon itself and retains informative names.