Design Initiative Phased Development Plan

The project has been split into seven phases:

1. Establishment phase: 25th April - 20th August 2011
2. Design phase: 22nd August - 30th November 2011
3. Theme discussion phase: July - December 2011
4. Candidate Selection: Early December 2011
5. Final Selection by: Mid December 2011
6. Theme development phase: Jan - April 2012
7. Refinement phase: May to D8 Release

1. Establishment Phase

The Establishment Phase will run for two months and focus on laying the groundwork for the Design Phase. Outcomes need to be ready for the Design Phase launch on the 22nd August (Drupalcon London).

We have three main outcomes we need to prepare before the launch of the Design Phase:

1. Designers Toolkit - includes the Design Brief, Selection Criteria and a set of wire-frames (in progress).
2. Build the collaborative site for posting design comps and discussion (started).
3. Design Initiative Blog (this needs to happen ASAP). This is now taking place on http://groups.drupal.org/design-drupal/d8di

2. Design Phase

The Design Phase will run for a little over 3 months. This will primarily take place on our own collaborative designers site. Designers will post design comps to the site, get feedback from the community and be able to iterate and improve their designs (to better suit Drupal 8 design goals and requirements). This will be a rich resource for designers to mine the collective knowledge of Drupal UXers, designers, themers and other front end Drupalers.

3. Theme Discussion Phase

Concurrent to the Design Phase discussions should take place to identify and refine our core theme requirements. Discussions are likely to center around some core issues:

• Mobile device support
• HTML5
• Snowman
• Theme settings
• Phase 4: Web Services and Context Core Initiative (http://bit.ly/hRCQo2)

4. Candidate Selection Phase

This is a short 7 days phase when the candidate themes will be selected, from these the final selection will be made.

5. Final Selection

During this phase the final selection will be made. This will mark the end of the public design phase of the initiative.

6. Theme Development Phase

Running from early Jan 2012 to around the end of April 2012 we will build the actual core theme in our initiative sandbox. The goal here is to have committable code by May 2012.

7. Post Commit Refinement Phase

Due to potential changes in core, bugs or other issues we will need to refine the theme over the balance of Drupal 8’s development cycle.

Add a new theme to D8 issue: http://drupal.org/node/1087784