Matt's Dev Log

design

Right now, we have a pause on major features in WriteFreely. I've finally started to work through the backlog of outstanding pull requests, some of which were from mid-2019, and now am getting to more of the polishing side of things. So coming soon, there will be some small new visual changes in WriteFreely / Write.as, particularly that affect user blogs.

  • Dates on blog posts. It's been missing for years. They'd show on the blog home page, but not blog posts. Well, this is no longer the case. Soon, posts on blogs that use the Blog display format will consistently show dates both on their home page and individual posts. Other display formats will continue not showing dates, because that's exactly what they're there for: not showing dates.
    • Also, dates are now correct, relative to your device's timezone!
  • <table> style. These elements were previously unstyled. Now they'll have some improved, basic styling that you can easily override with custom CSS. See #194.
  • Consistent user page headers. User pages (Blogs, Drafts, Account Settings, etc.) were all over the map with their headers. I'd start using a new style on new pages and not update the old ones. Well, now that's fixed in #262. Write.as users will notice this change is already live.
  • Slightly more line height. We've added 10% more space between lines of text. It's perhaps too small to really notice, but large enough to make a nice improvement. Changes in #263.

On the admin side, we're redesigning the dashboard to make it much more user friendly, and optionally less technical, in cases where an instance is in a hosted environment and the admin doesn't care about getting into the weeds. See #264. We need this change in Write.as for Teams, but it should also prove helpful for other WriteFreely hosts.

Particularly since these are visible changes that affect users, we want your feedback! Please jump into those pull requests on GitHub, try things out, and let us know what you think. We want to be sure people are happy with these upcoming changes before they get released to everyone.

#wfdev #design #WriteFreely


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