WWW-Redesign Contest is dead. Praise $DIETY!!! Amen.

Well, I was planning on announcing this later on but I guess now is as good a time as any. I posted this to the gentoo-dev mailing list in response to a question concerning the new Gentoo Theme. I thought it best to post it here as well:

The redesign as it was known up until this point is no more. There were things the winner of the contest had to do and he failed to do them (after almost 2 years of trying to get him too). I discussed it with klieber a little and after much thought I have decided that the WWW-Redesign Contest is now officially dead and abandoned.

Instead, I’m now the “Web Coordinator”. I proposed this new role to the Infra Leads and met no resistance or objections so I have taken the initiative and created the role. Also, neysx and I together were approached and offered to be the new www node administrators as a team. Of course we both said yes. Official Infra Monkey at last! 😀

As Web Coordinator I am responsible for ensuring a consistent look and feel and adherence to standards across all *.gentoo.org sites.

This includes standardizing on an xhtml-1.0 layout with a standard set of css id’s and classes so that a single “core” style sheet can be shared across all *.gentoo.org sites with a minimal custom style sheet being imported to take care of the site specific styling. This will make it **so** easy to change the ENTIRE *.gentoo.org web presence layout/design by simply dropping in a new style sheet.

Basically what I’ll be doing is letting the individual maintainers of the various sites focus on the back-end functionality of their sites. Leaving the forward facing html/css for me to worry about freeing up their valuable time.

wwwredesign.gentoo.org already has been converted and is going live on www.gentoo.org shortly (we just have a few last minute things to do).

I’m also working on bugday.g.o (with GurliGebis), planet.g.o and torrents.g.o and those 3 should be ready to go by the end of the month. Hopefully upstream for planet and torrents will accept my patches where applicable. Even if they don’t these web-apps are pretty simplistic and keeping a customized version up-to-date will be no problem.

I’ll be working with tomk on forums.g.o and we already have a plan in the works. The forum has already been so heavily modified that it is almost not even recognizable as a phpbb anymore. tomk says we can pretty much do what we want to it (within reason) without having to worry about upstream accepting our modifications.

bugs.g.o will be done with jforman. bugs.g.o is a touchy one, it’s one of our most used resources so it will have to be done very slowly, very carefully and I’ll have to get all the relevant patches accepted upstream. I doubt jforman wants to stray from the official upstream release very much, I haven’t talked to him about this yet though so I’m not sure. bugs may end up getting a new header/footer and nothing else. We’ll see how it goes.

packages.g.o is a custom web-app written and maintained by marduk who is currently busy in real life. I’m putting this one on the bottom of the list until he gets more free time. I *could* just style the existing site without him but he is working on packages-2.0 and it will add a lot of needed functionality. I’d rather wait and do this the right way instead of wasting time styling a site that he is going to replace anyway.

Neysx and I also have a plan to make the stylesheet user selectable so we can offer multiple themes. He already has a semi-working prototype at gentoo.neysx.org (it doesn’t work in IE yet). I’ll extend that concept to all the other websites. This fits perfectly with the idea of theming the websites to match the liveCD’s. We can offer that theme as the default but still let people choose the “classic” style or any other styles we may offer.

Realistically speaking I can have all of this done by the 2007.0 release (maybe not bugs – depends on how much jforman is willing to stray from the official bugzilla release). If everyone wants to shoot for 2006.1 for this new theme I will at least have 4 sites complete and ready for the new theme. The others can be themed as I get them upgraded.

I know the redesign was a great big PITA. I faced many obstacles in getting it put up live (the specifics are irrelevant). Now that I am a full fledged Infra member with some actual authority and the support of the rest of the Infra team (teaming up with neysx is also making it MUCH easier) I can actually get (and AM getting) things accomplished.