Drupal.org Improvements

We sat down with Mark Boulton and talked through the mockups with the designer team and the implementation team. The theme follow up was integrated into the document in the themers group: http://groups.drupal.org/node/18940 This post is about the page layout changes / suggestions made up while discussing questions which came up in implementation.

Even though English in not a problem for me, I understand the importance and need to offer a website in other languages, so I really like that the new design have that in mind. Particularly as it also means that the internationalisation support for Drupal is moving up a few notches in priority.

Before I go into the main topic of this post, a little note about the placement of the language select. In the mockup (iteration 11), the select language listbox is placed at the bottom. I think it should actually be placed in the header instead as that will make it much easier to find. Especially those, who's English is not very good tend to leave if they don't find a language quickly without having to scroll to the bottom of a very long page. They could also be shown as flags.

Oki, back to topic. I have one site I am using the Internationalization modules in and it works just fine. The only real issue though is that browsing modules and other add-on stuff and finding information on what languages they are available in is not very easy. In most cases I have to actually download the module and check if it supports translations and if so if it is available in the language(s) I need.

So it got me thinking a bit about how this can be improved on drupal.org and I came up with the following. I will use modules as example, but I believe similar features can be applied on other areas as well, such as themes.

Currently I think there are some issues in the page.tpl.php implementation. I'm going to use the header area to define this in particular.

Directly within #header-top-inner you'll find a grid-4 followed by two grid-8s. I am assuming that this is the intention:

http://skitch.com/eclipsegc/brdwa/skitched-20090209-163228

and not this:

http://skitch.com/eclipsegc/brdie/skitched-20090209-163528

If diagram 1 is the intention then it would be better implemented as this, which will consistently hold a 2 column layout.

http://skitch.com/eclipsegc/brdwj/skitched-20090209-162941

Hey Drupallers
So this is my pro/con list of the blueprint framework that mark bolton used for the prototyping of the new drupal.org

First up: Im a big fan of finding a unified way of doing the frontend work, but im not in it for any course - a frame work isnt good task B just because somebody else uses it for tast C.
Mark Boulton uses blueprint for their prototyping, which makes a lot of sence. Theres a lot predefined classes that makes it really easy to quickly build up a bunch of pages in html.

A group of us broke away from the overall redesign sprint @ DrupalCamp Cologne, to specifically discuss theming. We worked on outlining a few action items, and setting some deadlines. Here is what we came up with.