Separating Weather and Greeting sections

[Gitoffthelawn]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
I may have found a bug that would likely be resolved if the Weather and Greetings sections were separated into 2 separately toggleable sections.

I've often thought Bonjourr could be improved if each of those sections could be toggled and positioned independently. Right now, the UI is a little unclear, but Greetings are actually a subsection of a larger Weather and Greetings section.

If you agree that the Weather and Greetings sections can be independent sections, then I won't have to spend any time trying to identify that possible bug. ;) Plus, Bonjourr will benefit from an improved design and increased flexibility. :)

Describe the solution you'd like
Separate Weather and Greetings sections that can be independently toggled and positioned.

Describe alternatives you've considered
Returning to using an abacus.

[victrme]

Are you referring to independent sections in the settings menu ? Or also able to move around on the page ?

The latter is not possible unfortunately, it is a compromise that we had to make when we made the sections toggleable. The goal was to keep the layout "as is" so that users don't suddently get a different layout when updating to 1.16.

It is not impossible, but it would be too much work and spaghetti code to move Greetings independently on the page and keep the same "Bonjourr" layout.

[Gitoffthelawn]

Are you referring to independent sections in the settings menu ? Or also able to move around on the page ?

I am referring to both, as logically the user will likely not correlate one with the other.

Although your English is clear and very understandable regarding the compromise that you had to make for existing users to update to v1.16, I'm trying to imagine why that is still the case. For example, let's say v1.18 has the ability to move Weather and Greetings sections independently. In this case, all existing users with those sections enabled would automatically have those 2 sections located next to each other so their layouts are not changed. All users (new and existing) could then move the sections, if desired.

Another way to approach it: What if you created a new section and allowed the user to include a greeting in it? Would the current code preclude that?

I'm probably just not aware of an implementation detail that is restricting what seems relatively simple. Either that, or your brain accidentally got stuck thinking something needs to be true when it doesn't really need to be true anymore (happens to all of us, especially when we get focused on a project!).

[victrme]

We could separate the two the quick and easy way which would look like this:
(I am using custom Quotes for this)

Obviously this is not ideal, we want Greetings to be right above Weather. What could be done is to align-bottom Greetings and align-top Weather by default like this:

It works, but there are multiple problems:

• Default sections are not spaced properly on the page. Links & Time are too far from the Main section. We could set specific height for each sections, but that would add a lot of complexity to a problem that the CSS grid already solves.
• Links & Time are too close to the edges, ideally we want the default sections to be at the center of the page. We can't use padding top/bottom because it would reduce the space available if the user chooses to add more sections.
• Greetings & Weather would have to have a different alignment by default, which adds a bit more complexity.
• It would break the users custom layout when updating to the hypothetical v1.18. Trying not to break the layout would be tricky.

All of these issues can be resolved, and again, it is technically possible to do all of this. But the only way I see it is by "hacking" and adding exceptions... Someone very clever might find an easy and/or elegant way to fix those problems, but I'm just a guy and to me it looks like a lot 😅

I should mention that I agree that separating Weather & Greetings is a good thing and I want that to happen ! Right now it is not high priority, but I'll mess with it a bit more.

[victrme]

I probably should not have closed this issue, as everything discussed here is still relevant !

[Gitoffthelawn]

I'm sifting through my GitHub notifications (so many of them!), and just want to make a quick note that I'm still interested in having this implemented. I also want to link it to #395 as they are related.