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Nico Zanferrari | 19 Nov 2011 12:43
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Occupy Moin Street!

Moin to all, this is a CALL FOR ACTION!

- the problem: Moin actually has a really old fashioned design.
Looking at it, you could think you're still living in the Ronald
Reagan era. "Gone with the wind" seems much cooler than the official
theme and the corresponding web site.

- the need: we absolutely need a good designer and UI architect who
will be able to take us in the post-Obama era. The new 2.0 version
should be a revolution, not only for the code but also for the eyes!

- the risk: we've learned from the past that making a new theme is
quite easy. But having a fully supported one, with high quality and
committed developers for the near future is not so simple.

So, a great addition to the Moin team would be some artistic/design
person who feels passionate about moin, and about creating and
maintaining a good theme. If you think you could help, please apply
within!

**********************************************************************

Apart from the propaganda and jokes, I wrote a 'desperate' mail on
this subject to Thomas Waldmann. He replied and suggested to forward
his ideas here. This is the relevant part of his original mail:

[...]

For moin2 (which is the "in development" version and the place where new
stuff should happen), we also search for someone caring about this
(Continue reading)

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Kai Jaeger | 21 Nov 2011 08:13
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Re: Occupy Moin Street!

Although I cannot contribute in any respect due to a lack of
necessaryskills I would like to express my support: Nico is absolutely
right;this needs to be addressed.
Are there any plans for a general test suite for testing themes?
That would be a great improvement because it would give one
theopportunity to check whether a certain theme is working as it
should.Together with a history it would make the decision in favour
(oragainst) of a certain theme much easier.

Kai

On Sat, Nov 19, 2011 at 11:43, Nico Zanferrari <nicozanf <at> gmail.com> wrote:
> Moin to all, this is a CALL FOR ACTION!
>
> - the problem: Moin actually has a really old fashioned design.
> Looking at it, you could think you're still living in the Ronald
> Reagan era. "Gone with the wind" seems much cooler than the official
> theme and the corresponding web site.
>
> - the need: we absolutely need a good designer and UI architect who
> will be able to take us in the post-Obama era. The new 2.0 version
> should be a revolution, not only for the code but also for the eyes!
>
> - the risk: we've learned from the past that making a new theme is
> quite easy. But having a fully supported one, with high quality and
> committed developers for the near future is not so simple.
>
>
> So, a great addition to the Moin team would be some artistic/design
> person who feels passionate about moin, and about creating and
(Continue reading)

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Radomir Dopieralski | 21 Nov 2011 08:55
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Re: Occupy Moin Street!

Incidentally, anybody with the necessary skills is already using those
skills in their day job and possibly a dozen of side projects. Sure,
it would be great to have a dedicated contributor with some design
skills who cares about the looks and usability, and loads of free time
to spare (making themes is a really time- and attention-consuming
task). Any project would love to have such a person. It's probably not
going to happen.

>From my own experience with MoinMoin themes I can say it is a very fun
and rewarding work, but it takes a lot of time and some concentration
-- you cannot really do it after work. I was lucky enough to organize
things so that I could work on MoinMoin during my day work at the
university -- I made them use MoinMoin. Unfortunately, that changed
when I changed jobs, and currently it's hard to convince my boss that
I need to work on a project that is not ready to be used and it is not
sure if it's any better than the paid tools we already use. That's all
about a moderately-skilled programmer with some basic experience in
design. A real pro would be completely impossible to get (they often
even have to choose between important projects inside the company).

So, unless you will improve something yourself, there is little chance
of a miracle happening.

On Mon, Nov 21, 2011 at 08:13, Kai Jaeger <kai <at> aplteam.com> wrote:
> Although I cannot contribute in any respect due to a lack of
> necessaryskills I would like to express my support: Nico is absolutely
> right;this needs to be addressed.
> Are there any plans for a general test suite for testing themes?
> That would be a great improvement because it would give one
> theopportunity to check whether a certain theme is working as it
(Continue reading)

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Paul Boddie | 21 Nov 2011 23:39
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Re: Occupy Moin Street!

On Monday 21 November 2011 08:55:04 Radomir Dopieralski wrote:
> Incidentally, anybody with the necessary skills is already using those
> skills in their day job and possibly a dozen of side projects. Sure,
> it would be great to have a dedicated contributor with some design
> skills who cares about the looks and usability, and loads of free time
> to spare (making themes is a really time- and attention-consuming
> task). Any project would love to have such a person. It's probably not
> going to happen.

Having done some themes for Moin, I agree that it's a lot of work, but taking 
what Thomas wrote about getting all the details right, I think that Kai has a 
point about testing. One thing I did find better about Moin than, say, 
MediaWiki was that covering the special cases in the theme is easier with 
Moin: with MediaWiki, there are a bunch of special pages with their own 
layout that you have to check, whereas Moin re-uses a lot of the same styles 
and also doesn't tend to invent so many special pages for things. The problem 
then is the stylesheets for extensions, but that's another matter.

> From my own experience with MoinMoin themes I can say it is a very fun
> and rewarding work, but it takes a lot of time and some concentration
> -- you cannot really do it after work. I was lucky enough to organize
> things so that I could work on MoinMoin during my day work at the
> university -- I made them use MoinMoin. Unfortunately, that changed
> when I changed jobs, and currently it's hard to convince my boss that
> I need to work on a project that is not ready to be used and it is not
> sure if it's any better than the paid tools we already use. That's all
> about a moderately-skilled programmer with some basic experience in
> design. A real pro would be completely impossible to get (they often
> even have to choose between important projects inside the company).
(Continue reading)

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Thomas Waldmann | 23 Nov 2011 17:27
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Re: Occupy Moin Street!

> coherent font, colour, spacing rules that those designs

does that sound like 3 gci tasks?

i have no real practice with web design, so please someone else make
some doable tasks.

there is also a open bitbucket issue for design guidelines, maybe we
should have some stuff in that area, so design looks more consistent in
the end.

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Paul Boddie | 24 Nov 2011 00:45
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Re: Occupy Moin Street!

On Wednesday 23 November 2011 17:27:44 Thomas Waldmann wrote:
> > coherent font, colour, spacing rules that those designs
>
> does that sound like 3 gci tasks?

I don't know. I've been trying to distill the essence of theming various Free 
Software applications but it has been a work that I have not completely 
dedicated my time to. As you may remember, I covered Moin, Mercurial (hgweb) 
and Roundup in a talk at EuroPython 2009, and I found that you can share a 
fair amount of theming information between them. This shouldn't be so 
surprising because they all obviously use CSS for such purposes, but it's the 
structure of the styled documents that presents the challenge.

Although I didn't get to package up some basic recommendations or guidelines, 
I found that you can start with a Moin theme, where Moin is fairly rigid in 
the way it structures its output, or at least there are conventions that are 
widely used, and then bend the other software to use similar conventions, 
thus enabling the re-use of various CSS rules.

Take a look at these sites to see some level of consistency between Moin and 
hgweb:

http://hgwiki.boddie.org.uk/
http://hgweb.boddie.org.uk/

I didn't finish the Roundup theming, unfortunately.

> i have no real practice with web design, so please someone else make
> some doable tasks.
(Continue reading)

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Thomas Waldmann | 12 Dec 2011 19:01
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new moin2 theme

the good news: I am currently working on a new moin2 theme.

I did a clean start from zero, NOT copying complete old css.

Currently, the "show" view already looks quite nice (lots of other stuff
is still very broken):

wide screen:
http://img1.uploadscreenshot.com/images/orig/12/34421575874-orig.png

narrow screen:
http://img1.uploadscreenshot.com/images/orig/12/34422093566-orig.png

as you see there, there is still quite some css missing (e.g. those
paragraph symbols in the headlines should be hidden usually).

I will try to get that stuff to a "not totally broken" state ASAP
(before pushing it to main repo), so we maybe can even have some Google
Code-In theme tasks.

btw, I need a name for that theme, currently it is named "foobar".

the bad news:
* it might be that while cleaning up the whole html/css/layout mess, I
have to break compatibility to the moin2 modernized theme as it is now.
* flask-themes extension is broken for loading templates from the theme
for flask >= 0.8 (which we use), I did a quick fix, but have no idea
whether it is complete, see the flask-themes issue tracker. as long as
we can't easily get a fixed version/release for that, this is a blocker
(or at least a major annoyance).
(Continue reading)

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