[Product-Developers] Thoughts on championing OOTB themes

David Bain david.bain at alteroo.com
Thu Feb 21 13:39:45 UTC 2008


Question. How important is all of this if deliverance becomes the
standard technology for Plone?
http://www.openplans.org/projects/deliverance/project-home. It seems
to me that if we get Deliverance working flawlessly then we open up
Plone to 10,000s of themes.

I'm just wondering whether the community shouldn't be looking at
what's left to make deliverance trivial to use for a designer/css guy.

On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 4:31 AM, Espen Moe-Nilssen <espen at medialog.no> wrote:
>
>
> Hi
>
> Den 21. feb. 2008 kl. 01.44 skrev Ken Wasetis [at Contextual]:
>
>
> 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.)
>
>
> The "competition" has lots of nice themes copared to plone.
>
>
>
> 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-$50 USD, which is pretty amazing to me.  I've
> though of contacting some of their developers to have them port them to
> Plone - how hard could it be if you have the PSD files and a little DIYPlone
> help or paster script help, right?
>
> With just the PSD files making a theme is not that fast, would at least take
> a day, probably more.
> If you have the access to a site running the theme I consider things a bit
> easier.
> If for example some (different) people wanted the same theme, a price of
> 30-50$ would be possible, remember, there is quite a lot of content types
> and css in plone.
> If there is a wish to port some themes to plone and a little money in it
> (maybe $150?),, this would be fun to do.
>
> Alsoi, if porting A LOT of themes from for example jombla, the average time
> to create a theme could be a bit faster (as its possible to search/repleace
> in css files)
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> 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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