Tuesday 4 December 2007

wiki.d.o theme -is it bad timing or too late?

I have been working recently working on the wiki.d.o theme; this work was started last year around May - June and I halted it due to lack of time. The point was (opposed to what many might have thought) to make a theme that looks like the www.d.o theme.

Currently the TODO is outdated, so here is an updated one (I'll update it and push it there, too):
  • fix the alignment issues of the edit page for MSIE
  • port the changes done in __init__.py into debian.py
  • clean up the screen.css and add comments for the hacks made for MSIE
  • decide if the CSS3 border-radius is worth the trouble and, if it makes sense, replace with a portable implementation like is done for http://www.debian-ports.org/
  • retest on Opera, MSIE 6.0, iceweasel/Firefox and konqueror (iceweasel is the reference)
  • test on other browsers (maybe MSIE 7.0)
There are some screen shots with the current theme as seen on Opera, Epiphany (for some reason sometimes different from iceweasel) and MSIE 6.0, but here are again since I expect that my public darcs repo will change:

In MSIE (by far the most annoying browser and creates the most issues):


In Opera:


In Epiphany (the window was smaller, the content isn't bigger):

If you want to contribute, you can:

darcs get http://users.alioth.debian.org/~eddyp-guest/darcs/wiki.debian.org_theme

read the README to understand what matters, and tackle one of the items on the TODO list above.



I found it pitiful that Zack has based his PTS rework based on the wiki.d.o default theme since that theme is, in my opinion the one that should be corrected (at least the colors should be).

I am not an expert in aesthetics and i don't claim that the www.d.o theme is beautiful, but it seems that the recurrent discussion of it being replaced with something better never found a person to make it true. This is one of the reasons I stopped last year since it seemed the dream would come true at that time.

10 comments:

Dan Callahan said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Dan Callahan said...

I also felt that the Wiki theme wasn't the best source of aesthetic inspiration for Zack's PTS redesign, so I've been working with him to create something a little more modern and debian-like.

The current mockups are at http://neoflux.net/tmp/pts/

At this point, I've passed the CSS back to Zack for a little more tweaking, and I'll work on IE compatibility once we have the PTS sending a DOCTYPE that throws IE into "standards mode" rendering.

Anonymous said...

wiki.d.o looks much better then d.o please use your time to modernize the second one.

Anonymous said...

wiki.d.o looks much better then d.o please use your time to modernize the second one.

Which theme? The default one? I have to disagree. That is a default MoinMoin theme and the maroon yells 'Ubuntu'. Debian is not Ubuntu.

BTW, have you seen how that default theme looks on MSIE?


eddyp

Anonymous said...

http://browsershots.org

eddyp said...

The current mockups are at http://neoflux.net/tmp/pts/


This looks great!

Is that "Debian Red"? No, it looks nice, though, but kind of worn out.

Debian red is #BF1238.


At this point, I've passed the CSS back to Zack for a little more tweaking, and I'll work on IE compatibility once we have the PTS sending a DOCTYPE that throws IE into "standards mode" rendering.


I just checked the mock-ups in MSIE 6.0 and they both look fine, but the three columns variant already overlaps the columns when maximized on 800x600.

The two columns version is more tolerant and starts to overlap at about 700px (or maybe even more) wide window.


I like the 2 columns a lot more.

eddyp said...

http://browsershots.org

wow, thanks!

Dan Callahan said...

Thank you for the compliments on the mockups.

Is that "Debian Red"? No, it looks nice, though, but kind of worn out.

Debian red is #BF1238.


I'm using #d70751 as it's the color of the dot in the logo, which is the only graphic used. To be honest, on debian.org, the red bar, swirl, and dot all have different colors. Which is something I really think should be addressed :)

eddyp said...

I'm using #d70751 as it's the color of the dot in the logo, which is the only graphic used. To be honest, on debian.org, the red bar, swirl, and dot all have different colors. Which is something I really think should be addressed :)

I picked the color #BF1238 from that page, but I don't remember if I picked it from the logo (but I tend to remember that was the case).

Anonymous said...

Please, don't use this theme.
Use mentors.debian.net like theme which is much more nicer.
See also this mockup:
http://bp2.blogger.com/_Kt5oTKwLAwQ/RjGrPCrTRhI/AAAAAAAAACU/0yipKwLVs5Y/s1600-h/debsite.png

Some brainstorming can be found on wiki.debian.org:
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianWebsiteDiscussion