gnu-social/docs/designer/src/guidelines.md

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Design considerations

Humans have an innate understanding for common, predictable and repeatable concepts. Our brains are, in fact, hardwired to take advantage of such phenomena. Patterns emerge when concepts and actions, interlinked, construct a predictable outcome. This basic idea should always be employed into the design of a user interface, because it inherently supplies an innate understanding of user interaction.

So, just bear this in mind. Try not to reinvent HTML elements, use them properly.

The designer docs are intended to help out in the development processes of both the Core components, and Plugins. With an emphasis on the frontend side of things, of course.

Basic layout

Bear in mind any of the following assumptions are based upon the default theme, your mileage may vary.

The layout is subdivided in 4 distinct areas:

  • Header
    • Left panel checkbox button :)
    • Left panel
    • Main instance link / header 1
    • Right panel checkbox... I mean, button...
    • Right panel
  • Current page content

GNU social's basic page layout

Each one of these areas are selectable with CSS by using a limited set of classes. You can use whatever classes you may want, but bear in mind that any external code made by someone else other than yourself may not account for your specific class names.

CSS classes reference

Name Function Dependencies Examples Sub-classes
section-panel Side panel - Preceded by a checkbox hack (hide/show panel); Left panel \App\Component\LeftPanel\templates\left_panel\view.html.twig
Right \App\Component\RightPanel\templates\right_panel\view.html.twig
section-panel-left, section-panel-right
section-widget A sub-section of a page, commonly a template block of a component / plugin None Login template \App\templates\security\login.html.twig section-widget-title, section-widget-subtitle
section-widget-title A template block's title - Part of a section-widget; Settings template \App\templates\settings\base.html.twig None

still in construction...