[Product-Developers] Thoughts on championing OOTB themes

Ken Wasetis [at Contextual] kw_dev_lists at contextualcorp.com
Thu Feb 21 00:44:58 UTC 2008


Veda,

You're absolutely right - we're way behind where some of the other open 
source projects/communities are on this one.  It appears that the Drupal 
folks had the same idea regarding the use of csszengarden as a model:  
http://themegarden.org/drupal50/   (many, many drupal skins demonstrated.)

If you google 'joomla themes', 'mambo themes', or 'drupal themes', it's 
pretty revealing how much of a market there should be for a Plone themes 
site, and I think that's what it likely may take (perhaps a site with a 
ratings feature and that allows different designers/developers to upload 
their themes - not just a per-vendor site, though those sites would 
proliferate more wide skinning of Plone as well.)

Here are some more examples (related to Joomla):
http://www.joomla-themes.co.uk/
http://www.joomla-themes.biz/
http://www.joomla-themes.org/

For mambo:
http://www.themesbase.com/?category=Mambo
http://www.pixelsparadise.com/
http://www.themegurus.com/

Many of the themes are $30-$50 USD, which is pretty amazing to me.  I've 
though of contacting some of their developers to have them port them to 
Plone - how hard could it be if you have the PSD files and a little 
DIYPlone help or paster script help, right?

Just some ideas of what's out there for other tools, anyhow.  I hope 
that you're able to get something going with the Theming Champ from the 
PSPS.

Cheers,
Ken

vedaw wrote:
> I was not at the summit, and as a result haven't gotten a lot of information
> on what's expected from me to improve the theming story for Plone, but I
> have a few ideas here and would love feedback.
>
> 1) Identify the key players we need to round up for this. I'm thinking David
> Convent, Alex Limi, Donna Snow, Denis Mishunov, the 14 year old wunderkind
> I've been hearing about, and I'm sure there are more. Maybe the folks at
> Quinta Group? I think we should also identify some designers, or determine
> if we're going to liberate Wordpress or other similar free themes. I'm not a
> huge fan of most of those themes, as most of them seem very ugly or too
> dumbed down, but I could be talked into using them.
>
> 2) Create a dedicated theming section of the site and pull in select theming
> docs there. Break it down into 2.5 and 3.0 so that it's clear, and keep a
> link to other theming resources in the docs section. I'm thinking that we
> narrow the field here and point them to the core docs. Possible visual
> change to that section with thumbnails illustrating what the skins look
> like. I'm thinking something over the top here, a la csszengarden.com. There
> has long been a perception that the only thing you can do to easily theme a
> Plone site is change the color of the tabs, and I want to break that
> perception. At the very least, we need to make this page show thumbnails of
> available themes: http://plone.org/products/by-category/themes
>
> 3) Possible sprint? I'd rather not do a virtual sprint, as I think the
> in-person sprints are more successful, but we have to also be aware of where
> our skinners live -- on opposite sides of the ocean. Is there any interest
> here on this? I'm flexible to leave the country, but I know that many people
> are not, due to having families.
>
> 4) Review the competition and see what they're up to in their theming
> sections. There may be some interesting ideas we could borrow. 
>
> 5) Put together some best practices to make sure that users don't have to do
> any internal tweaking to make a skin work. I'm thinking specifically
> instructions on how to use GS properly when building skins, plus a "right
> way" forward -- buildout vs the unified installer. I'm still not sold on
> buildout, and this warrants some real discussion. Designers and skinners
> don't need all of the overhead that buildout brings with it, and maybe
> buildout isn't appropriate? 
>
> 6) Joel Burton mentioned a skinning contest, but I'm a little wary of this.
> What do other people think? I just don't know how successful these things
> are, or what we would offer as a prize. 
>
> Next steps are to get general feedback and additional thoughts. After that,
> I'd like to put together a final list of action items, set a timeline and
> establish owners. I believe it was Donna who pointed out that 3.0 came out
> six months ago, and we don't have a solid 3.0 theming story or the
> organizational structure to support what we do currently have in place. I'd
> really like to see that change.
>
> Thoughts? 
>
> - Veda
>   





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