eldir

A few days ago I asked the amazingly talented Young Hahn, from our corporate sponsors Development Seed to take a look at the Aegir logo and see if he could make any improvements.

What I wasn't expecting was to log in on sunday night, and find that Young had not just designed an amazing new logo for us, but also created a very professional theme built specifically for Aegir. He successfully integrated the core goals of the project and built a very clean theme that leverages the functionality that Aegir provides in a clear, concise and visually appealing way.

So after picking a name, young contributed it to Drupal.org's CVS repository (where all aegir projects are hosted). The new theme is called Eldir, who was one of Aegir's helpers in norse mythology and his name also means 'Fire Stoker' in old norse.

Part of the philosophy of the Aegir project, is to have as few as possible requirements. And to that end, we have decided to make the Eldir theme an optional component, that Hostmaster will only use if it is available. Any packages we produce ourselves will also include this theme, but if you are assembling your own hostmaster profile, you can leave it out.

One of the reasons we are doing this , is because Aegir is designed to be 'white boxed' and work with any Drupal theme you throw at it, by not depending on Eldir we don't fall into the trap of just making theme level hacks for display problems, but will have to architect them properly.

This theme is going to be a god send us poor developers who are so very, very tired of Garland at this point.

Young has also written a post about the design process that lead to the new theme.