Task title
Theme display on drupal.org

Task description
This is in addition to http://code.google.com/p/google-highly-open-participation-drupal/issues/...
The idea here is to enhance the ability of a Drupal designer to make a more informed decision on which theme to use. Often screenshots help a lot when choosing a theme, but to present a structured way of characteristics of themes would greatly help those in need of styling their website, whether it be those wanting a site up and running within minutes or those on a longer term Drupal theming project. So in terms of usability this would constitute a major step forward. This is the proposal: when submitting a theme, it should be added with details such as amount of columns, theme engine, whether it is tableless or not (not whether it is CSS-only or not, since CSS-only is an ambiguous term) and source order. Ultimately and upon delivery a business case to the site administrators will be made to release this to drupal.org.

Deliverables
Make a suggestion to how the form for submitting a theme should be enhanced to enforce the basic characteristics of a theme: http://drupal.org/node/14208, such as these:
* Theme name:
* Developed by:
* Version / build number:
* Theme engine (if any):
* Columns: 1, 2, 3
* Layout: fixed, ice, liquid
* Source order: 123, 213, 312, etc
* Tableless: yes, no
* Known browser problems: IE/Win, IE/Mac, FF/Win etc etc
Some of the above may not be very important or even undesirable, so please make a suggestion as to what the form is going to look like. This was taken from the following thread: http://drupal.org/node/60478
Then collect the characteristics for each of these themes.

Resources
For your form proposal you can make a prototype and submit it to the issue queue for testing. For the characteristics themselves you are likely to benefit from the themegarden: http://themegarden.org

Primary contact
[tbd]

Comments

aclight’s picture

I don't think anyone would argue that it would be helpful to have more structured information about the various themes on d.o. However, since themes are all project nodes, I don't think that it's a feasible suggestion at this time, since as is project nodes can't store additional information. Basically you'd want to associate CCK fields with project nodes. It might also be possible to do this with taxonomy, but currently I believe the administer nodes privilege is required to set taxonomy terms on a project node on d.o.

So I'm not sure how feasible this task is since implementing it would require some fairly major infrastructure changes. Have you looked at either the project or drupal.org infrastructure queues to see if there is already an issue about this? If there is one, you might see how that was resolved and go from there as far as this GHOP task is concerned.

So if the task was just suggesting what kind of data would be useful to collect, that would be feasible but probably too easy. But if it's designing a form for all of this information, that's going to depend what happens in the project module and what the d.o infrastructure thinks is possible/desirable.

webchick’s picture

Status: Active » Postponed (maintainer needs more info)

What about a task like http://code.google.com/p/google-highly-open-participation-drupal/issues/... but for the theme downloads section? Might be useful to get some mocks of WordPress/SilverStripe/Joomla theme download sections and then come up with a list of recommendations and a mock to shoot for, even if we can't implement it right now yet.