Proposal for experimental layout boolean

[milanlakhani]

I am involved with a project to use landscapeapp to produce an open-source
landscape for my client. They have some layout and rendering changes that
they would like to see made; some of which are general improvements to
Landscape which I believe you may want to use by default, but some which
may need more refinement before their inclusion would be sensible.

As such, we were thinking that it might be a good idea to have an experimental
layout option which could be set in the settings to turn on/off these layout
and design changes, so that individual landscape owners could try them out
and see how they feel. If changes are considered universally improving of the
UX, then we can remove the optionality and make them default.

If this workflow makes sense to you, then we'd propose adding…

# settings.yml
big_picture:
  main:
    alternative_layout: true

…to trigger the alternative layout behaviours.

I'd be happy to follow up to this issue with screenshots showcasing some of the
changes we're prototyping, along with relevant settings.yml or landscape.yml snippets to illustrate how they work.

If I've missed some built-in mechanism for this that is already present, then
please let me know and I'll be happy to switch our patches out to use that.
Otherwise if there's a general consensus that this approach isn't bad, then
I'll provide the setting and our first UI change as a PR soon.

cc @michaelmoss @awright @danielsilverstone-ct @GeriG966

[awright]

hi all. for both clarity and transparency -- Bloomberg is said client in the issue above. we are interested in using the landscape framework to demonstrate the breadth of our open source landscape internally to technologists. we want this to be a tool for us to learn about the people, communities, contributions etc etc behind these projects as it is about learning about the projects themselves.

so much of our changes are about making the landscape a bit more readable/digestible. while being built for an internal use case, we hope these landscape modifications allow for others to build landscapes as well. so any feedback/suggestions/questions, etc etc about the work is much appreciated!