With the help of Lewis Nyman, Melissa Anderson, and Tatiana, we are continuing the work we started last month to make the BlueCheese theme more open and allow for the community to contribute more easily.
Lewis has now separated out the trademarked and copyrighted elements from the BlueCheese theme. Our plan is to keep such elements in the private repository, and make the rest of the theme available for people working on Drupal.org improvements. Specific elements that were removed or changed include:
> The Drupal logo
> The colors indicated in the style guide
> A few background images and icons
The aim is to release a theme that, if someone decided to install it on a site (which is not our intent here), has no chance of confusing users to believe they are on Drupal.org or related site. We won’t support this theme as generally installable. At the same time, we need to ensure that developers have enough elements of the theme that they can reliably understand how their code changes will affect the look and feel.
Now we need an input from you. This stripped down version of the theme is available on the development site (un/pw is drupal/drupal for the htaccess popup and you can’t log in because we sanitize both emails and password hashes). If you are doing any sort of development for Drupal.org, please take a look and let us know, will this version of the theme be enough to avoid any intellectual property disputes and what’s the best way to handle these changes while keeping the theme maintainable? Please record your your findings and thoughts in the discussion already happening on groups.drupal.org.
We’re looking to get this wrapped up and out in the world ASAP, so please get your feedback to us by Friday, 27 December. We’ll work as quickly as possible to implement your feedback and create the new theme after that, keeping you posted on progress and dates in the issue queue. I hope this is just the first of many ways that the Association and the amazing volunteers like Lewis and Melissa can help eliminate barriers to contributions from the community across Drupal.org.
Comments
Can help - Please share the
Can help - Please share the development site URL - the link on the post not working.
Shyamala
Unimity Solutions
Fixed the url. Thanks for
Fixed the url. Thanks for your help!
Great
As a developer, I confirm that I would be able to see how my interfaces behave on the theme. I ran through the site as anonymous user and bacon user to simulate how I would normally go about looking at interfaces in my own process to see how views and other elements are laid out.
I only did a quick run-through so I am sure that there are things to improve. I hope that the process of merging bluechees into bluecheese-dev when the former is changed is relatively easy for the d.o team.
This is a great idea, and a good step to removing barriers to improve d.o. I also smell a watchdog article about the process. ;-)
Speaking as "not a themer"
Speaking as "not a themer" but as someone who is currently in the process of trying to make a change to Drupal.org that involves (among other things) theme changes, I am not sure the "colorless" way is going to work in practice, at least for some sets of changes.
Specifically, Create fieldset styling that matches issue edit form mockup (part of Implement first iteration to improve issue queue workflow) asks for the way fieldsets are done to be re-styled to a new look. Without the ability to tell that the links are blue and the background is a particular Drupal.org-shade grey and not just any old grey, this would be really difficult to pull off.
Another initiative I worked on recently was https://drupal.org/drupal-8.0. Now, in this case, we just created this as an actual piece of content so it could be edited by whomever. But most landing pages on Drupal.org are not like that, and are instead stored in code in the bluecheese theme. It's important for these landing pages to conform to the overall site design, but if the "Test Drupal 8 dev" button had been black, rather than green, it'd be really hard to tell what they'd look like once deployed "live."
Neither of these problems are insurmountable; we could've granted access to Mark Carver and Gábor Hojtsy respectively to Bluecheese "proper" theme to do their hacking. However, I'm curious how critical it is that all of the colours are kept out of the design in order to protect the trademark. Could we get away with only the header colours, for example? And leave the body colours in, which is where 99% of the community-driven changes will happen?
Another case for keeping the
Another case for keeping the "body" colours in is the lack of link styling on e.g. http://theme-drupal.redesign.devdrupal.org/project/issues introduces a usability problem; it's impossible to tell which of those columns have clickable links and which ones don't, short of having a really good memory or hovering all over the place and seeing what happens.
I find it amusing that we
I find it amusing that we post the colors publicly anyway: https://drupal.org/node/1051644
Besides as @drumm pointed out to me, any person can inspect d.o and "steal" the colors anyway. There's no logical or practical reason to strip out the colors for the public repo.
But there is a big difference
But there is a big difference between public documentation and open sourcing the theme that provides the branding for the site.
It is impossible for us to 100% prevent anyone from using the same design if they really wanted to. The main requirement is to show we are actively trying to prevent it. This is an important distinction when maintaining trademark rights.
Right. People can indeed copy
Right. People can indeed copy the website if they really want. But we don't want to make it a super-easy, 5 minutes thing to do.
Thanks, this is the kind of
Thanks, this is the kind of feedback I was hoping we would get. Chances are we were overly thorough the first time around but this is the easiest way to flush out any potential issues. I think everything outside of the main header is up for debate. The green buttons are all over the place on d.o and subdomains. I'd rather learn on the safe side, maybe just tweaking the green slightly instead of replacing it with black would be enough.