UPDATE:
While the following post was primarily geared to the Los Angeles Drupal group, it (should) have some relevance to 'some' folks in whatever group you're reading this in. This is an ongoing 'drupal' project and the more folks that can get actively involved would be a very good thing....
I had a chance at Drupalcon (aka the OSCMS Summit) to talk with some of the Drupal rock stars about how we (the Drupal Dojo, our regional group, a related working group, or anybody) can ramp up our contributions on various 'mission critical' projects. The themer pack is one particular project that could be completed by a few people in a relatively short amount of time.
Having said that, I'm proposing that we devote a significant portion of our Los Angeles meetup to making a contribution to this effort. If we're well coordinated (assign specific tasks to individuals, collaborate with other people working on the project) we may be able to have a good chunk of the project complete by the end of this weekend. After making it much easier to custom theme Drupal (i.e. make look pretty), we could focus on related projects.
The following links should provide a bit more background and reference points -
* Themer Pack Working Group
* Drupal Dojo Lesson on 'Theming and the Themer Pack'
* How to contribute to the project
* Work in progress
Please leave your thoughts/feedback regarding tackling this for the LA meet and/or actively contributing to this project inso we can best coordinate our efforts.
Comments
Was this supposed to be posted here?
Not sure how you mean this to dovetail into dojo activities. I'm sure the theming lesson would be of some use to your LA group (I hope anyway), but why is this on the dojo page?
Tresler Designs
CNDP, LLC
Lesson was project specific
While I'm hoping the L.A. group can make a contribution to the project, it's definitely 'still' open to the dojo and others (check the status page). Part of the intent of dojo lesson was to get people involved in this drupal beneficial project - it's still not complete - so I'm not sure how the post is out of place...
Gus Austin
Director of Chaos and Confusion
PepperAlley Productions
What am I trying to do with Drupal?
Gus Austin
Didn't say it was out of place....
I asked why it was here. Are you calling for people from that lesson to come help? Are you proposing a second more in-depth lesson around this? Are you asking for dojo-specific volunteers? Is there something from that lesson that you want clarification on to proceed with this? Do you want to hold a dojo-esque session during your LA meetup? Do you just want advice from dojo members abouthow to tackle this in your LA meetup - none of this is clear in your post.
In short, what is the purpose of this post in regards to the dojo group? Your title says "Workshop Proposal" but I think thats directed at your LA group - unless you are proposing a dojo-style workshop? That might be cool, but I can't tell from your post.
You ask for feedback about tackling it for the LA group at the end. If you are asking for feedback about how to tackle this in a dojo setting - then propose something to the dojo and ask for feedback.
I'm happy to have this here in regards to the dojo - but this post seems pretty clearly to be directed at your LA group and cc'ed to the dojo. - So I ask why it is here? What do you want as feedback from the dojo?
UPDATE: I'm really not trying to be critical or say your post is out of place. I sincerely want to know what you want from the dojo community?
Tresler Designs
CNDP, LLC
Merely trying to connect the dots
Since this is a important project for Drupal, I didn't think it would hurt to send the message out to specific working/learning groups that had previously touched on this topic (if anything, just as a subtle hint that there's still work to be done). Possibly the initial post could have been broken down in a way to speak to each audience - more of a call to action. But once again, the previous Dojo lesson was a workshop proposal.
So, I dunno - it's a challenge to try to 'efficiently' connect/engage groups and individuals that may have an interest in a particular post/topic/project. Even though this thread has gone down the rathole, I think there's still some value if folks read the post and realize that there's still a big project that's open for contributions.
Gus Austin
Director of Chaos and Confusion
PepperAlley Productions
What am I trying to do with Drupal?
Gus Austin
Two more dots
I agree that there something of a movement forming around Drupal and themes/design/designers, but I have yet to see anyone stepped up to with the time to drive this. Another "dot" that I've voiced my concern about is the Drupal.org redesign that's already in progress. I'm trying to get the people involved in that to stop thinking about themes.drupal.org and go with a more role based sub-site of designers.drupal.org.
I don't know if it's worth the effort to try get the people running http://www.drupalsites.net back into "the fold" or if bureaucracy that comes with being an "official" drupal.org site like groups.drupal.org is why sites like http://www.drupaldojo.com/ exist? Why isn't the dojo site dojo.drupal.org?
Northwestern's jschool recently announced they would be using Ektron for their CMS. I'm a big fan of open source, but I'm willing to pay for a commercial solution if it's substantially better so I asked for a demo of Ektron. I lost interest in Ektron really quickly after the sales person "guiding" me through the demo told me the big advantage Ektron has other CMSes was their ActiveX WYSIWYG editor. I asked what their editor could do that TinyMCE couldn't? The guy had never heard of TinyMCE?!? After sitting through the entire demo, I can tell you... there's not much you can do with $10,000 and Ektron that you can't do with Drupal, TinyMCE, and IMCE. Sure Ektron has an 800 number you can call, but a $10,000 donation to the Drupal Association would buy you a lot of support karma (and from much brighter people too!).
The only thing that made that demo worth watching was seeing the Dreamweaver extensions Ektron provides that gives designers "hooks" into the Ektron CMS content. IMHO, it is too much of a jump for many designers to move from great page design to great theme design. Developing Dreamweaver extensions (or better yet, Coda snippets) that allow designers to start pulling data into their layouts would go a long way towards bridging that gap.
If something gets rolling from this, let me know.
I don't care what project it
I don't care what project it comes from, I think it is AN OUTSTANDING IDEA!!!
I came across this post in the themes group, but it is of interest.
What sort of Idea do you have for making it easier?
Wayne Wolder - JOAT
http://2W Direct.com
Wayne Wolder
http://2W Direct.com
Agreed, Ease of Theming is Drupal's weak point
Drupal would be much more popular if customizing themes was easier. The Drupal theming process has a fairly steep learning curve and I have not found that the documentation on the theme structure is spread all over the place. Can anyone point me to the one or two docs that explain the guts of the theme structure and how to make significant design changes?
I'd like to help the New York group work on improving Drupal's themeability. At the moment the process is fairly opaque.