Are there any layouts like Expressive from LJ

[sireesanwar]

I wanted to transfer some of my layout work over to Dreamwidth but there doesn't seem to be an equivalent of Expressive nor an easy want to move Expressive over to DW. Does anyone know if this can be done or if there is a similar layout I can learn? I've been looking but everything here seems kind of old school.

Not new to DW but not up on everything.

Comments

[momijizukamori]

I think Bannering or Heads Up are probably the most like Expressive in terms of look, but the underlying structure is pretty different - there's a unified page structure that like 80% of DW layouts are based on, with different CSS on top. Tabula Rasa is the stripped down version of that, though a handful of layouts make small tweaks to the page structure beyond that.

[sireesanwar]

When LJ chucked Flexible Squares I figured out how to get it back for people... but some people changed and couldn't go back (non-paid). But I stayed and learned Expressive but then it has become kind of obvious there is nearly nobody over at LJ. It's a shame because I do like the LJ set up.

Still if there are more people here then I'd love to be here and get back into journaling. But... I need to control my layouts so I think I'm going to dig in and learn how to customize Bannering which is a lot like Expressive visually. I moved a lot of my journals here but will see how it goes.

There is a lot to learn here but one is how to you link a journal? You used to do lj with (lj user="") and just put the name in. Is it just dw user?

[fyreharper]

It’s (user name= ), without the quote marks; same tag is used for communities and feeds. Here’s the FAQ page, including how to link to usernames on other sites: https://www.dreamwidth.org/support/faqbrowse?faqid=87

(Finding the FAQs is a little trickier than it should be; FAQ is under Explore in the menu on site-skinned pages.)

[momijizukamori]

The LJ syntax still works, for backwards compatibility reasons (<lj user="style_system"> = style_system for ex) but the DW-specific version is <user name="momijizukamori"> (momijizukamori), with the bonus that you can specify a site to link off-site profiles - so <user name="momijizukamori" site="livejournal.com"> = momijizukamori

I think there's a tutorial around for importing Flexible Squares (and a handful of other old LJ layouts) onto DW, but they won't always support all the new DW features, and I think can't be added as official DW layouts because they weren't actually open source (and at this point have markup that's fairly outdated by CSS/HTML standards). dreamwidthlayouts isn't super-active but is the main unofficial layout-sharing comm, and then dreamscapes is if you'd like to submit something to be turned into an official layout!

[sireesanwar]

Thanks for all the information. I appreciate it. So helpful. I'll keep those in mind. I'm more of a maker myself so if I have trouble maybe I'll head over and asks some questions.

[momijizukamori]

This is probably the best comm for questions, unless they're specifically about official theme submissions processes or something. Good luck!

[sireesanwar]

Thanks.