foxfirefey: Dreamwidth: social content with dimension. (dreamwidth)
foxfirefey ([personal profile] foxfirefey) wrote in [site community profile] dw_design2011-02-14 01:05 pm

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

So, one of the projects Styles has been working on is custom icon and profile pages. The stunning [personal profile] 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!
melannen: Commander Valentine of Alpha Squad Seven, a red-haired female Nick Fury in space, smoking contemplatively (Default)

[personal profile] melannen 2011-02-25 08:59 pm (UTC)(link)
I know it's not an easy solution. But as it currently is, if I lose site-scheme profile pages, it's possible that I could end up on somebody's DW page and not be able to navigate from there to a login screen, unless I luck in to clicking on somebody who does enable the navbar for logged-out people.

Actually, with a little bit of poking around, I guess most of the styles do have a link to the DW homepage at the very bottom of the page? Is that a required element for all styles? I *suppose* I could get used to using that instead, if I had to, I guess. :P But it would still be nice if there was some more prominent way. *curmudgeon*. (I suspect there are a lot of other people who are used to using userhead-to-profile as a shortcut to site scheme, too, because there's no other obvious way. And DW's site scheme is just so useful now.)
melannen: Commander Valentine of Alpha Squad Seven, a red-haired female Nick Fury in space, smoking contemplatively (Default)

[personal profile] melannen 2011-02-25 09:34 pm (UTC)(link)
Yeah, as a person who does a fair amount of using public computers, and sets cookies on my main browser to expire when the browser closes, I get the impression I see my sites logged-out a lot more than most people do. But I think, and not just for me, it's important to keep capability there for non-logged-in members to still be able to find things. And get to a screen it's easy to log in to from anywhere on the site. (Custom comment pages don't count. Half the time I can't find my way around them anyway.)

Could the link to the DW homepage be made a required element? Or would that cause a ton of screaming and yelling/break too many styles? I think if I knew it was guaranteed to be there, and in more or less the same place on every style, that would be enough to minimally satisfy me, once I got used to not being able to use profile pages anymore.

Having the navbar show on profile pages no matter what, as suggested above, would also work.

I know I could always manually type the address, but having to switch to typing mode just to get to the site's main page can be really annoying, especially if I'm navigating with my tablet or a touchscreen or a cat on the keyboard or one hand immobilized or something like that.