Translating IJ layouts to DW?

[maytakecenturies]

Hi! I'm hoping someone will have more experience with this than me...I found a great layout on Insanejournal, and I've been trying to apply it to this journal on DW with absolutely no luck. Ironically, I thought the hard part would be finding the source code for IJ's base Generator layout, but that was easy enough - I was able to compile it as an S1 layout thanks to IJ posting the source code.

However, the layout - code here, along with a preview of what it should look like - isn't compatible right off the bat. I have some experience with CSS, but I haven't used Span and Div IDs and Classes in layout CSS before, so I'm not sure how to translate this properly, or if it can be. I've already spoken with the layout's creator, and unfortunately s/he doesn't have any DW experience and doesn't know how to make it work over here.

Does anyone have suggestions? I would be eternally grateful!

Comments

[momijizukamori]

Hm. That layout is actually written in S2, so somewhere IJ must have code to convert S1-style layout variables to S2 or something. S1 layout sources look fairly different (I wrote one or two, a loooong time ago). Without a converter, you'd have to effectively write most of the layout over again, at which point you may as well do it on core2 - core1 is legacy, and doesn't get all the new features we implement.

[maytakecenturies]

Ahhh, okay, that makes much more sense. Would this source code compile on core 2 then? Rewriting it could be an interesting side project.

[momijizukamori]

nah, the code is written for core1. Basically both core layers provide a really basic framework to build layout layers on - core2 provides a lot more framework than core1, though. A bunch of our layouts are effectively just stylesheets on top of core2, or stylesheets with a tiny bit of extra code - with core1 layouts typically had to individually write formatting code for parts of the page (which is why some of LJ's core1 layouts look really different from each other, and why custom CSS for one layout would fail basically completely on another layout).

Thinking about it - the CSS parts of the custom generator layout should work on top of that compiled source, because the element names are the same. The trouble is that it looks like the custom layout uses an S1 hack to embed extra HTML into the layout, changing the page structure - those parts would have to be re-written, I suspect.

(I hope that makes sense, I'm not fully awake right now)

[maytakecenturies]

It makes sense! That's where I kept coming up short, it was those hacks I didn't recognize. I was confused because it didn't seem like the CSS elements were having any effect, but I assume it's the extra HTML that is causing it to falter. Thanks for your help! Knowing all this is much better than stabbing in the dark not knowing what the problem is.

[momijizukamori]

Yeah, the WEBSITE and TALK_LINKS sections shove in a bunch more HTML code (which was pretty common, because free accounts couldn't actually touch the layout source on LJ), and I assume at least some of the CSS in GLOBAL_HEAD applies to that. If the extra code isn't there, the CSS for those elements don't do anything. Glad I could help!