People who think the default wiki theme is nice

The people who think the default wiki.d.o theme is nice, should think again. Thanks to an anonymous reader I was pointed to http://browsershots.org and I looked at the wiki.debian.org default theme. Then I shrug.

This was after I made a few screen shots myself to prove that the default wiki.d.o theme looks like crap on MSIE or Opera even on a 1024px wide screen, not to mention 800px wide screen or smaller window be it of MSIE or Opera.

In case you think I have faked something, see for yourselves at http://browsershots.org/http://wiki.debian.org/ (the third request is for a 800px wide screen, so expect fun when is done uploading MSIE variants).

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Currently the TODO is outdated, so here is an updated one (I'll update it and push it there, too):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.