As pointed out in this Drupal thread, other site implementation are now using themes that are very similar to bluebeach. For example,
- Mambo's main site
- Ubuntu - Linux for Human Beings (runs on plone)
- Kubuntu (not sure what CMS this is)
Steven deserves a lot of kudos for coming up with what now seems to be a popular, contemporary design. However, it seems that part of the original reason for not releasing bluebeach is no longer valid:
In order to keep Bluebeach as a unique style for Drupal.org, the theme will not be made available for download.
I would suggest that it might be nice if a revised version of bluebeach was made available for download. One with a different color scheme and font would give some differentiation between drupal.org and Drupal sites (so that every other new site on the Drupal sites page doesn't look like drupal.org), yet allow Drupal site administrations to take advantage of this great design.
Besides, seems strange for drupal.org not to be using a GPL'd theme (or at least a variation of one) that is availble to everyone. Especially since Drupal could use more good themes :)
Comments
Sorry, I have to disagree.
Sorry, I have to disagree. Making bluebeach not available for download was one of the brightest ideas that was ever had on this project. Although some sites have copied some of bluebeach's ideas, I still think that drupal.org has a quite unique design. And I'd like it to remain this way. If you want a phptemplate theme that looks good and is made by Steven try friendselectric.
The reason why there are so few Drupal themes is simply that they are a whole lot of work. You do not only need to theme the front page, nearly every page needs some attention.
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thanks, but
I'm not really asking for me. There are some projects that I do where teachers might wish to use the theme. And I might use it myself in certain instances if it were available. But generally, I try to do my own stuff. I'm asking for those new Drupal site administrators who do not do theme design or are just learning it.
Also, I'm suggesting a variation that is different enough from drupal.org as drupal.org is different enough from those examples. Similar, but not the same, thus guaranteeing the uniqueness you are speaking of. A modified style sheet and graphics set would do the trick.
The last theme, Blue Marine,
The last theme, Blue Marine, became the de facto 'standrad' look for a huge percentage of Drupal sites. It was hard to tell that drupal.org was actually the home site for the project. Go through the Drupal-sites to see a lot of unmodified or barely modified sites. It's sad that I can usually spot a modified pushbutton, blue marine theme when I hit a site.
Just because the other sites bear a similarity to drupal.org does not mean they look the same. I honestly don't think they look the same myself. I doubt that a slightly modified theme would satisfy people. I mean, we are talking about color choice, graphics, text choice...... Most of the requests sound as if they want to run Blue Beach unmodified.
Steven has written and documented Friends Electric for the learning process. If I recall, he also did a presentation on the creation process. http://drupal.org/conference-antwerp-2005-media
-sp
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-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
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I admit that there are not
I admit that there are not that many Drupal themes available, but why does it have to be bluebeach? friendselectric is also very nifty and I guess that under the hood a lot of the code is similar. There are also several themes by Chris Messina available. Doing an alternative stylesheet for bluebeach will also need some time.
I suppose that bluebeach will at some time in the future become available - when Steven finds enough time to do a new drupal.org theme. Maybe you or anybody else interested can create a bounty for him to create a new drupal.org theme?
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Well said! I think that the
Well said! I think that the theme should remain here until there is another theme to replace this one. It's important for Drupal.org to have an authetic look and feel!
Sami
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While I agree completely, on
While I agree completely, on a slightly off-topic note, I think Drupal.org should use a theme that is reliable and does not break. This site breaks in quite a few places, due to CSS and markup issues..
If this means using hybrid table+CSS layouts, then so be it. If people want to see pure CSS themes in action, they can check out the theme garden or some such..
my 0.02,
-K
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Please submit bug reports as
Please submit bug reports as you find the bugs.
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Bluebeach for Semi-Official Drupal Sites?
Could Bluebeach be made available for language or country-specific Drupal support sites? For example, www.drupalchina.org and www.drupal.ru have attempted to duplicate drupal.org's appearance, with less than 100% success. Why make them flail, when they are doing something that Drupal.org arguably should be doing: promoting Drupal to people who do not speak English, and offering local-language support. Perhaps you could provide Bluebeach to us with certain limitations and assurances.
If creating a theme is such a large effort, it would be a shame to limit the return on the investment.
Less likely now than 9 months ago.
I'm sorry but I do not believe that Bluebeach will be better off as a public theme: it has given drupal.org a very distinct look and feel.
In fact, I think there is now even less reason to release it. 9 months ago, the biggest reason was that there was no equivalent, GPLd theme available. Thus, Drupal.org was using something not accessible to the other users. Now, there is FriendsElectric, which is very similar to Bluebeach under the hood: it just looks completely different.
And aside from that, there are now many more themes available. There is more documentation, and more attention for themes in general. Finding, using, altering and making a theme has never been easier. Any you can always look at Bluebeach's HTML, CSS or images to see how I made it. You're just not allowed to copy any of it literally.
If I were to release a variation Bluebeach, I would not be satisfied with it until it was as different from the original as FriendsElectric is. A theme's image is not just defined by colors and fonts, it's about contrast, proportions, margins and layout. Every little detail, from the radius of rounded corners to the way the page title is underlined only when there are no tabs, is Bluebeach. Furthermore, Bluebeach was designed specifically for Drupal.org: the blue would be too extravagant on any other site. The frontpage was designed specifically for spreading Drupal and making everything accessible. The theme contains a bunch of Drupal-specific styles, but also lacks a bunch of other things, simply because we don't need them (site name/slogan, secondary links, calendar block, ...).
All of this would need to be resolved: it would be wiser to make a whole new theme. I may do so in the future, but it takes a long time to do a good theme. Until then, if you want something like Bluebeach, get your hands dirty or find a designer and pay him well.
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One thing that ABSOLUTELY
One thing that ABSOLUTELY needs to be fixed with the drupal.org theme is the comments. You can't copy anything in a comment at drupal.org, it just copies the entire thing. Heck, just checking it, you can't even copy the whole thing.
That makes functionality a bit crippled.
I'm on Opera and can copy
I'm on Opera and can copy comments fine.. I think it might be a browser issue on your end..
-K
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Internet Explorer
Bluebeach is an advanced CSS-based theme. It has problems on browsers with bad CSS support, most notably Internet Explorer. Almost half of the time spent developing Bluebeach was already spent in trying to make it work in Internet Explorer. Any bugs that are still there are either too difficult to fix, or not worth it.
An example of an important CSS feature is print stylesheets: do a print preview of this page and you'll see you only print the content; the sidebars and header is not used. With a traditional, table-based layout, this would be much harder or would require a separate "printer friendly" page.
If you want to copy text, use a proper browser like Firefox, Opera or Safari. They all work fine, and you get to enjoy nice features like pop-up blocking, ad blocking, tabbed browsing and much more.
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Language-Specific Drupal Support Sites
>Bluebeach was designed specifically for Drupal.org: the blue would be too extravagant on any other site.
>The frontpage was designed specifically for spreading Drupal and making everything accessible.
Yes, but there are other sites with exactly the same needs, just in different languages. Kind of like http://groups.drupal.org, which is not really suitable as a complete language-specific Drupal support site.
I would suggest a bounty
That anyone that wants to have Bluebeach released start a reverse bounty. A great theme would generally go for at least $1000US.
Steven or someone else could claim the bounty (based on some initial graphical concepts), develop a new theme for Drupal.org, and then release Bluebeach...which would still have the issues mentioned, i.e. unstyled events for example.
Or put up money for a theme competition.
Do we want to replace Bluebeach?
Bluebeach is doing its job just fine: it has become a strong identity for Drupal.org. Changing it around is not just a lot of work, it is also a potentially bad move. If there are issues on Drupal.org, it is much less work to fix them in the existing theme.
So far the only reason brought up is that mamboserver.com and ubuntu look 'similar'. But there is still much identity left in Bluebeach.
Anyone is free to put up a bounty for a GPL theme. A theme that is designed from the start to be open and flexible will be much better for the community. Bluebeach is not fit for public release or use as a generic theme.
A theme competition is definitely a good idea, but we'd need good criteria to judge them. I don't think I would participate, but I wouldn't mind judging ;).
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Brand change a hugely bad idea
It's so hard to create a brand that changing Drupal's look from bluebeach to a new theme is a hugely bad idea. I for one hope it does not happen and that Drupal's look is never released publicly. Further, I would like to think that if people truly respect the gigantic amount of work that went and goes into Drupal, the bluebeach theme being a portion of that, that they will not try to reverse engineer the bluebeach theme and leave it alone, as something "sacred".
If you want a good theme, pay for a good unique one for your site to show how versatile Drupal is, or put the sweat in and cycle it back into the community. They're truly difficult to make.
Rick Cogley :: rick.cogley@esolia.co.jp
Tokyo, Japan
I Disagree too
the sites you mention look similar, but are not the same at all. BlueBeach still has its own look and feel, its own branding. the fact that there are sites that look similar does not change anything about the initial reasons for not releasing the theme.
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Sell a couple bluebeach's?
What about selling the use of blue beach to, say, 5 sites for $200 each. Then there's a guarentee'd total of 6 blue beach sites out there and you have the $1,000 to run the competition to make another theme that would satisfy the needs of someone who wanted a bluebeachesqe layout.
Nice idea!
Nice idea!