[theforum]

[Richard Bennett]

On Monday 21 February 2005 14:16, William Anderson wrote:
> >>Let's get
> >>the community in to help, big time, and let's make a huge thing of it.
> >
> > See, I'm all behind this, but not at the expense of throwing away what we
> > have without launching it.
>
> Why not?  To make an omelette ...

Hi,
As a long time thelist user, but only just subscribed to theforum, I'd like to 
add an outsider's perspective:
 
There's nothing critically wrong with the current evolt.org site, it has class 
and personality. 
I read the reasons for the makeover, and I agree it is a good idea to 
modernise evolt though. 
The current makeover candidate theme is only good as a place-keeper, to test 
the new functionality. Design-wise it doesn't really cut it as a final 
release version.
Drupal themes are quite easy to edit, and you're not going to loose any work 
already done, as you need to have something like the current 
re-design-candidate for people to build-on, otherwise the people wouldn't 
know which blocks of content are required etc.

Now as a potential redisign candidate, I would like to be able to re-use my 
re-design as a portfolio-stuffer afterwards, and to get some feedback on it, 
so it would be nice if you built a section on the live evolt.org site where 
people submitting a design could show their submission, and others could 
comment or rate them. (basically the same as current articles in a new 
section)
Just sending in designs by email and waiting, wouldn't inspire me to spend a 
lot of time on it, as it wouldn't have any added value for me, and you'll 
have more interest if you publish it on thelist, and rate/show the designs on 
the live site.

It would be a good help if you packages the current redesign-theme with the 
style-sheets, so people could use them as a starting-point.

I think you could borrow the design guidelines from other similar re-design 
contests.

I did something similar a little while ago when someone was looking for some 
ideas for their own site. The menu and content were fixed, and the graphic 
should somehow tie in with 'bitroot'. My idea was:
http://209.240.253.203/joe/joe.jpg
There were others too.
In the end they went with: http://bitroot.com
and everyone had fun doing it.

So I don't see why this should slow the release down at all, a theme can be 
switched in Drupal in a minute, so set out some space, some 
template/php/html+css to download, and some guidelines, and we'll get to 
work. In the meantime you can finish off the backend, and then decide which 
theme to use as ideas start coming in.

Richard.