Collaborate with Style Guide module

Tricky situation.

The Design project was technically created first, but was unpublished until today. Even further back in time, its code is actually derived from code in my CVS sandbox that was written for manual cross-browser testing of various D7 core patches that affected styling.

I've just looked at Style Guide's code, and it is indeed similar. But not identical. Interestingly, there are some helper functions that almost look identical (without knowing of each other), crazy. :)

Not much time right now, but we'd need to distill the exact differences and see whether it would be possible to merge on of them into the other. AFAICS, StyleGuide approaches the problem space from a developer perspective (providing various content pieces that could use some styling), whereas Design approaches it from the designer perspective (exposing markup in all possible variations that require styling).

The difference is technically subtle, but makes a big difference for themers.

I recall that @sun mentioned Design was going on when I wrote StyleGuide (which we did have non-developers work on), but there was no code. The two should be merged in some meaningful way. In fact, I think this should actually get into Drupal core, personally, as part of the test suite.

I don't have a huge concern which way the merge goes. StyleGuide isn't getting much attention -- even though there are 5 or 6 committers, myself and the Google student are the only active contributors. (Though @irakli added a README and cleaned some code style, IIRC.)

I would think we can take the StyleGuide API and the Design UI and merge the two... Of course, I think there's a patch that moves StyleGuide in that direction already.

See #950884: Render groups as sub-tasks? and #964188: Create sample nodes for display for the most interesting patches.

@sun if you want CVS access, I'll add you.

I started a module similar to Style guide called Markup demo (sandbox: http://drupal.org/sandbox/squiggy/1088136). Feel free to use any useful code from it. :) I would like to plug in to test and submit patches. Although more clarity on the direction of collaborating between these two modules would be nice.

Talked to a lot of people/themers in Chicago last week, and they are eager to contribute to the Design project as a solid/unique home to get this kind of stuff done. I also raised the question of whether to proceed with the markup/style/design testing code in the Design project or in the StyleGuide project (which almost everyone also knows already), and most people were in favor of merging into the Design project. Many weren't able to state actual reasons. My personal guess is that designers/themers aren't too fond of the technically explicit/correct module separation that "we developers" tend to like. In light of that, the current plan would be to merge StyleGuide module into Design module, but possibly still keep it as a separate sub-module (like now), so there's still room for other design stuff in the future.

Thoughts?

Works for me. Though I don't quite understand what Design tries to do that is so different. (But then, I haven't looked.)

I'd like to hear some of these anonymous "a lot of people" weigh in, though ;-p.

I just figured out what's going on.

'Design' is a discussion and issue-tracking space that is normally performed on Groups.d.o. StyleGuide is a working tool for site builders.

For now, I would just leave the two projects separate and post any 'module' code over in StyleGuide. That will give the implementers free reign to work, and issues developed here can be moved over using the issue tracker.

That would mean that existing functionality in 'design.module' which isn't in styleguide.module needs a patch.

This looks like a nice utility as well: http://drupal.org/project/pixelperfect