Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Gentoo theming during bootup

[Curtis Napier]

Grant Goodyear wrote:
> Curtis Napier wrote: [Mon Apr 10 2006, 09:53:04AM CDT]
>> I'm willing to theme *.gentoo.org to match [...].
>
> Speaking of which, what is the current status of the web redesign?
>
> Thanks,
> g2boojum

Well, I was planning on announcing this later on but I guess now is as
good a time as any.

The redesign as it was known up until this point is no more. There were
things the winner of the contest had to do and he failed to do them
(after almost 2 years of trying to get him too). I discussed it with
klieber a little and after much thought I have decided that the
WWW-Redesign Contest is now officially dead and abandoned.

Instead, I'm now the "Web Coordinator". I proposed this new role to the
Infra Leads and met no resistance or objections so I have taken the
initiative and created the role. Also, neysx and I together were
approached and offered to be the new www node administrators as a team.
Of course we both said yes. Official Infra Monkey at last! :D

As Web Coordinator I am responsible for ensuring a consistent look and
feel and adherence to standards across all *.gentoo.org sites.

This includes standardizing on an xhtml-1.0 layout with a standard set
of css id's and classes so that a single "core" style sheet can be
shared across all *.gentoo.org sites with a minimal custom style sheet
being imported to take care of the site specific styling. This will make
it **so** easy to change the ENTIRE *.gentoo.org web presence
layout/design by simply dropping in a new style sheet.

Basically what I'll be doing is letting the individual maintainers of
the various sites focus on the back-end functionality of their sites.
Leaving the forward facing html/css for me to worry about freeing up
their valuable time.

wwwredesign.gentoo.org already has been converted and is going live on
www.gentoo.org shortly (we just have a few last minute things to do).

I'm also working on bugday.g.o (with gurliegebis), planet.g.o and
torrents.g.o and those 3 should be ready to go by the end of the month.
Hopefully upstream for planet and torrents will accept my patches where
applicable. Even if they don't these web-apps are pretty simplistic and
keeping a customized version up-to-date will be no problem.

I'll be working with tomk on forums.g.o and we already have a plan in
the works. The forum has already been so heavily modified that it is
almost not even recognizable as a phpbb anymore. tomk says we can pretty
much do what we want to it (within reason) without having to worry about
upstream accepting our modifications.

bugs.g.o will be done with jforman. bugs.g.o is a touchy one, it's one
of our most used resources so it will have to be done very slowly, very
carefully and I'll have to get all the relevant patches accepted
upstream. I doubt jforman wants to stray from the official upstream
release very much, I haven't talked to him about this yet though so I'm
not sure. bugs may end up getting a new header/footer and nothing else.
We'll see how it goes.

packages.g.o is a custom web-app written and maintained by marduk who is
currently busy in real life. I'm putting this one on the bottom of the
list until he gets more free time. I *could* just style the existing
site without him but he is working on packages-2.0 and it will add a lot
of needed functionality. I'd rather wait and do this the right way
instead of wasting time styling a site that he is going to replace anyway.

Neysx and I also have a plan to make the stylesheet user selectable so
we can offer multiple themes. He already has a semi-working prototype at
gentoo.neysx.org (it doesn't work in IE). I'll extend that concept to
all the other websites. This fits perfectly with the idea of theming the
websites to match the liveCD's. We can offer that theme as the default
but still let people choose the "classic" style or any other styles we
may offer.

Realistically speaking I can have all of this done by the 2007.0 release
(maybe not bugs - depends on how much jforman is willing to stray from
the official bugzilla release). If everyone wants to shoot for 2006.1
for this new theme I will at least have 4 sites complete and ready for
the new theme. The others can be themed as I get them upgraded.

I know the redesign was a great big PITA. I faced many obstacles in
getting it put up live (the specifics are irrelevant). Now that I am a
full fledged Infra member with some actual authority and the support of
the rest of the Infra team (teaming up with neysx is also making it MUCH
easier) I can actually get (and AM getting) things accomplished.

I should copy this to my blog too so I don't have to repeat this a
million times....