What about having a default wp blog installed somewhere, and a bunch of stylesheets, each showing the effect of a change made in the stylesheet, and links which apply those stylesheets to the index.php like the styleswitcher? This could be a replacement for your graphical css guide, if we ever need one.

Better still, what about an app that lets you edit the stylesheet and apply it to index.php so you can see changes in real-time? Would that help users try out different things and decide on the best set of rules for their stylesheet? What I am suggesting is like a public template editor that multiple users/people can work on together to arrive at the perfect design, if required.

Matt’s idea of an online wizard is probably the same, I was just not sure, and so decided to be verbose with this comment.

Wizards. I hate them :)
There has not yet been invented the wizard that has produced results good enough for me to use. An online wizard ? I wouldn’t go near one (after a first look). It would take control away from me, not enhance my control. And the server it is on must be robust enough to support the hits it will get – not just from users, but from people trying to break it / fault it. The wp server gets stressed now – I suspect that will worsen when 1.3 gets out.

This sounds negative, but any help has to be understandable to someone who is stressed and frustrated. It must be clear, unambiguous and lead them in straight lines, and they must never be given the chance to say “but the program changed it to what I didn’t want”.

Help must be aimed all over the place, from the first time blog user, to Eric Meyer.

Maybe, just maybe, we should stop offering in-depth support for stylesheet modifications. The reason I say this is because of the problems associated with supporting all these requests, largely to do with the number of people who would be willing to donate their time and effort. This is not something too un-user-friendly I guess, since it is better to be good in offering complete support for a few things, than to be bad in answering support requests, with an insufficient number of volunteers.

A look at the MT forums shows that stylesheet support is limited to the default stylesheets. Please do not think that I am washing my hands off the issue of supporting style requests. I will try and learn some CSS and then start answering those questions. But you do realize that individual needs, and the ability to articulate the needs is highly varied, and so answering style support requests is the most difficult thing, don’t you?

Root, your method happens to be an old method, that has been around for a while, if I may say so. I was curious and so I tried it for a change, so I can say I have, is all. I am no CSS expert, and I don’t know how to say which one’s better than which, to be honest.
I use Kubrick too, on my latest blog. It just so happened that Kubrick was around and I wanted a new blog, so I used Kubrick, just like I used your template for the previous blog, which happens to be WordLog. Thank you for the design, it works, but, as far as I am concerned, so does the default wordpress design, modified to meet my requirements, which are not very high :)

As to reducing support …. where do we draw the line ?
That’s a bit like saying “Got a plugin problem ? Email the author”.
The PHP requests we get on there are sometimes met with almost glee by those that code, yet those of us that help would just like more help.

Take right now – there are posts on the forums which people could easily answer, yet my money says those same people are on irc chattering away.

I’ve said my bit before about the irc channel in a mailing list post, I won’t repeat it here, but it had no discernable effect.

Where the line is drawn is a very good question. How much of what you do with regards to CSS problems is fixing the problem versus basic education? Along those lines, some people want to learn new things but I would say most of those we get on the forums are goal-oriented, not process-oriented.

For the latter pointing them to W3Schools, Sitepoint, CSS-D, or webdesign-l would be the best possible thing we could do for them. Their thirst for knowledge would be far better met there. The former just want it to work, and don’t care how they get there. For them we should just try to help them first and encourage best practices (eg not using tables) if we can.