Expressive for Scrapbook

[tinyjo]

OK, the Expressive for Scrapbook layer is now in a state where is is useable, I believe. Under the cut is instructions on how to use it. Any and all comments, requests for features, bug reports or, well, anything related to the style, comment here. If LJ wants to nick this for the site, feel free :) You can find the layer code at http://pics.livejournal.com/manage/styles/advanced/layerbrowse?id=66432. S2 people, do you think this would be suitable for general S2 communities as there don't seem to be any Scrapbook specific ones?

1. Go to http://pics.livejournal.com/manage/styles/advanced/ and, in the Create Style text box, enter a name and click Create
2. On the resulting page, ignore the box for Language. In the box for Layout, select [other]. In the text box which should now appear, enter 66432. Click save changes.
3. Now go to http://pics.livejournal.com/manage/styles/. You should see your newly created style. Click on the Edit link
4. On this page, DO NOT touch anything in the style settings bit, even though you'll see the wrong layer name here. It's a bug. As long as you don't save style settings you'll be fine. Instead, click the Customize (or Edit if you already have customizations) button in the Customize section
5. You're now in the customization wizard. Customize to your hearts content, including choosing your theme (much easier for me to do that this way rather than in theme layers).
6. To actually use the thing on your Scrapbook, go to http://pics.livejournal.com/manage/styles/ and click the radio button next to the name of the style you created

Using this method, you should get any updates I make to the layer automatically, which'll be nice :)

Comments

[jinty]

cool - it works, just like that!

[tinyjo.livejournal.com]

Yup :) And I fixed the slight display glitch I noticed in your header :)

wowza!

[cleanskies.livejournal.com]

OK, I'm using it now with robots 3-col if you want to go see! So far looking very groovy, only noticed one odd effect -- sorting by date, gallery name, last updated etc. sometimes cuts the displayed galleries down to 8 only, with no links to more. Not sure why. At the moment I'm seeing this on sort by date in IE. Other than that, not spotted any probles -- it's smooth and lovely, great layout and with none of the irritating stretch glitches the basic scrapbook styles suffer from.

Any other quibbles are really livejournal's fault, I think -- it would be great if there was a handy "upload" (or manage?) link on the home page of your galleries -- and it would be great if your pictures were atomatically in the main navigation on your journal page ( instead of "Recent Entries - Archive - Friends - User - Info - Memories" , "Recent Entries - Archive - Friends - User - Info - Memories* - Pictures" ) -- and it'd be great if the navigation strip was there on scrapbook pages, but I wasn't getting any of that from scrapbook anyway ...

P.S. I love my blurb boxes! Any chance you could step me through how to put them on my main blog page?

P.P.S. I want to pimp this on my journal, may I?

Re: wowza!

[tinyjo.livejournal.com]

I could probably add an overall upload link. In fact, come to think of it I could do a per galley one easily. Watch this space!

It should be fairly easy to add blurb to your main style but I'm at conference tonight. Will check tomorrow though.

Finally, pimp away. I'm happy for anyone to use it & they can comment here for help, features, etc.

Handwriting makes me brief! See you later...

Re: wowza!

[tinyjo.livejournal.com]

The sort thing could be specific to sort by date because when you do that it only diplays galleries that you've given a date to, which is annoying. I didn't see the problem on any of the other sorts. Manage account link on front page and upload links on front and all gallery pages are now go (the gallery ones should pre-fill the gallery selection on the upload page for you). Now I've got that working I could add links for any of the pages linked from the manage gallery page so just poke if you want more options :)

Blurb boxes on LJ

[tinyjo.livejournal.com]

Ok, to get this working you have to create a custom theme layer. Go to http://www.livejournal.com/customize/advanced/layers.bml and create a new layout specific layout - select Theme in the first drop down list and Expressive in the second.

That will take you back to the same page where you'll see a new entry in the list under "Child of layer 7176168: Expressive" called "(none)". Click the edit button for this layer.

I've created an example layer which demonstrates what you need to do. http://www.livejournal.com/customize/advanced/layersource.bml?id=7383143&fmt=html

You can actually just copy and paste this wholesale and then just change the box title and text in the bit starting at line 54.

A brief explanation - what you do is you choose an identifier for your box (in this case, myblurb) and add it as a string to the 2 lists of modules (one is for people who would see ads, one for those who don't) where you want it to appear - I've put it between the third and fourth selected sidebars. Then you add an elseif section for a module with the name you've given it like I have for myblurb. You can do that as many times as you like, just give them a different name each time.

Hit save and compile. You shouldn't get any errors (if you do and they make no sense, poke me - most of the errors I get are ones where I've made a typo and are fairly easy to spot and fix :) ). Now you can go to the normal customize page and you should be able to select your theme (which is now called extra blurb) from the bottom of the theme list.

The final thing to note is that because this is a custom theme layer you also need to do the bit that your normal theme layer does, which is to set the stylesheet. That's what the bit at the top does. If you want to change to a different theme, you can see what the other stylesheets are called by clicking on their name in this list (http://www.livejournal.com/customize/advanced/layerbrowse.bml?expand=7176168) and copying their value for base_theme.

Hopefully that makes sense as a quick run through. I'm going to write it up as a proper tutorial for S2howto later so if it's not clear, poke me.

Re: wowza!

[cleanskies.livejournal.com]

Ah, that explains it. I'm very lax about dating stuff because (as a member of the blogging generation, damnit!) that's something I expect the system to be doing for me ...

Just the "manage" links as they are are working fine for me -- in fact, I've done more re-arrangement and housekeeping in the last day than I've ever done before in Scrapbook because the new design has done a wonderful job of streamlining the pain ... plus, when I go look at the finished pages, I think oooh! Rather than "ugh".

Re: Blurb boxes on LJ

[cleanskies.livejournal.com]

Okay, think I've got it -- I'll give it a go later.

[vierasesine.livejournal.com]

Brilliant!

[scaffold.livejournal.com]

Very cool:)

[modernarchetype.livejournal.com]

That is very cool! Thanks for sharing I am now using it! :)

[tinyjo.livejournal.com]

You're welcome :) It's really nice to see all the different themes - I only tried out a few to make sure it worked.

[casey.livejournal.com]

It works great, for the most part-- however, for whatever reason, some galleries refuse to load when I switch over to this style.

It's kind of hard to test it when I only have limited sets of data and it's hard to upload new pics and galleries just to test out my theory, but it seems like the only problem (that I've seen) is with galleries that have no pictures and 4+ subgalleries. When I click on those in my pictures, it tries to load for a long time before finally just rendering a blank white page and stopping. I tried switching back to the previous style and the gallery loaded up immediately with no problem, so I guess it's related to the style somehow?

Overall, though, great job. This is really neat.

[tinyjo.livejournal.com]

Huh! That's really really odd. It seems to be something to do with the Last updated date. I put a bit of conditional code to check if it was there before I printed it and that seems to have fixed the problem, even though one of those galleries does seem to have a last updated date set. It definitely wasn't the number of subgalleries because I have quite a few like that on my own Scrapbook. Anyway, it seems to have fixed it even though I wouldn't have expected it to! Thanks for letting me know.

[kwsapphire.livejournal.com]

When trying to get my links to appear in the links box:

if I have a comma in my link title- [a]link title, with comma[/a] all -of the links are one giant link, all html is visible, and it links to the first link with the comma. Remove commas from all link titles, and no links disply, with or without LI code.

[kwsapphire.livejournal.com]

I'd also like to be able to make my thumnails "scaled" instead of "cropped and fitted to specific size." If at all possible.

[tinyjo.livejournal.com]

What you're supposed to enter into the Links box is like this:

link title, link URL, link title, link URL

so it's true that link titles with comma's wouldn't work because it's using that as a separator. I'll have a think and see if I can make that work any way. It should work OK without commas though - can you paste what you've got in the box into a comment and I'll check it out.

PS sorry for the double email - accidentally posted anonymously!

[tinyjo.livejournal.com]

ooh, good point. I never added any of the thumbnail options I had planned. Watch this space - I'll put them into a new version.

[breau.livejournal.com]

I was wondering when someone would get around to that!

This rocks. Kudos for stepping up.

Question - what about doing this for a community's scrapbook? any ideas?

[breau.livejournal.com]

ps. is there any way you can adapt this so it works once you click on a main gallery? After I click a gallery, it reverts back to my original style.. thoughts?

[kwsapphire.livejournal.com]

No problem, and thanks for the fix! It posts properly now.. much appreciated!!!!

[tinyjo.livejournal.com]

You should now have the option on the Presentation tab (since I had a free minute or two :) )

[tinyjo.livejournal.com]

Communities can't use the Scrapbook feature at all so that's a no-go - sorry.

[kwsapphire.livejournal.com]

You are AWESOME.

(Just a little background if it matters: my site got hacked, either that or my host lied to me and added code to most of my html pages, despite the fact that they deny having done it. Either way, major suxorz. So I moved all of my html to my journal, and use the expressive layout to create a "site." Without using my frames anymore, it was making my galleries "un-navicable" and was basically "breaking" my "site." So your implementation of expressive into scrapbook is like.. Christmas. Better than Christmas. Thank you SO much.

[tinyjo.livejournal.com]

It should work for all your galleries. If you look on the Manage Gallery page for your galleries, do you have (default) selected for their style? Because you can set a specific style for individual galleries which might be overriding it.