[Moin-user] Occupy Moin Street!

[Paul Boddie]

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.

Well, what I've written above is kind of orthogonal to actual design 
suggestions - what kind of "design language" is being used, the typefaces, 
colour schemes, and so on - but then again, there are situations where all 
this has been decided upon and you need is documentation for applying it to 
Moin (and other software). This was the case for the FSFE Fellowship, where 
there is a common theme across a bunch of different applications (Moin, 
WordPress, Planet) and where I had to start with a stylesheet and try and 
re-use as much of it as possible without copying and pasting it into 
something completely new.

> 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.

I'll take a look. I think Moin gets quite a bit right in this area with its 
common.css stylesheet and media-specific stylesheets, but some high-quality 
guidelines on where to apply theme information might make for a reasonable 
project, I imagine. I'm also interested in knowing how one might port themes 
to Moin 2, even if it's just the CSS that survives the transition.

Paul