[Product-Developers] Re: Thoughts on championing OOTB themes

Paul Everitt paul at agendaless.com
Thu Feb 21 17:26:50 UTC 2008


Sorry, just saw this thread.  Some points:

1) I'm the champion for "Make Deliverance trivial for design/css 
person".  I've posted a few blog posts on it, written up the start of a 
PLIP, and did the post-summit announce on plone-dev regarding the Trac 
ticket assigned to me.

2) I want to make sure I get a good gathering of people that are the 
target audience.  If they don't like it more than the status quo, we 
shouldn't do it.

3) Since this is middleware, those that are completely happy with the 
current way of doing design in Plone can just ignore Deliverance.

4) "Embrace Deliverance" was part of the *strategy* summit, which was 
focused on longer-term, more substantial fixes.  Thus,  Veda's effort 
(and this thread) are still useful for near-term attention.

4) David is right...if Deliverance is done right, then thousands of 
themes should be immediately.

5) Tom's "barebones" skin is indeed an activity.  Tres and I started on 
a "CMFXHTML" skin for CMF to explore ideas on this.  It's focused on 
packing the maximum of semantics into the HTML and the minimum of 
chrome/theme.

6) The biggest first thing we need to handle is using different themes 
in different contexts (URL, person, error pages, whatever.)  Tres and I 
have a really nice and simple idea for handling this, which he announced 
on the Deliverance list yesterday.  (This can also handle the "inject 
the username" issue.)

In summary, Veda's effort is a valid one, and Deliverance is a different 
thing.  For the latter, I'm interested in finding the correct venue 
(plone-users?  plone-dev?  here?) for explaining and listening.

--Paul


Tom Lazar wrote:
> FWIW, i, too find deliverance very interesting but the way i understand 
> things, deliverance will never be (and could never be) a full 
> replacement for a 'handmade skin product'. but i'm sure it would be fine 
> for the majority of usecases.
> 
> in this context i was wondering whether it would make sense to include 
> one 'barebones' plone skin that soley exists to serve as 'fodder' for 
> deliverance. OOTB plone pages are rather heavy-weight and offering a 
> light-weight version might speed things up.
> 
> just an idea. right now i don't have the ressources to actually set 
> something up and benchmark it, but i have a client project in the 
> pipeline that might warrant such experiments. unless somebody beats me 
> to it ;-)
> 
> On 21.02.2008, at 14:39, David Bain wrote:
> 
>> 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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>>
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