Claudia K�nnecke wrote:
Ferdinand Soethe wrote:
I really like your skin design. The clear typographically structuring
of the menus, the use of color and the placement of logos and
background image would make it very useful for commercial and private
sites.
Would you consider donating it to our skin pool? Or short of that share
the code so that others can copy bits and pieces of it?
Hi Ferdinand!
First of all thanks for the praise - we feel flattered :)
We see no problem in sharing our skin-code, but beware - we had to bend
some rules in certain areas (e.g. changing stuff in skins/common/xslt)
to achieve what we wanted. There possibly are ways to prevent these
changes (especially in the 0.7 codebase - which we haven't looked at yet).
There is no need to change the common files, simply override the
templates you need to change in your own skin. We can show you how to do
this when working on your skin package donation.
We started the website in December 2004 where documentation was rather
sparse and spent a lot of time learning things the hard way so possibly
not all of our solutions are 'by the book'.
The Open Source way is to take code and polish it, so no worries there.
So if this hasn't scared you yet, please contact us on how we may give
back to the community.
I would love to see your skin made available (I too like it a great
deal). However, we need to discuss exactly how to accept this donation
over on the dev list (this mail is copied to the dev list and replies
will be sent there).
In the past Forrest has not wanted to accept new skins because we do not
have the resources to maintain them. Consequently, we added a
skin-packaging system that allowed people to develop skins and make them
available via an automatic download mechanism.
The hope was that we would be able to encourage people, such as
yourself, to make their skins available via a zip download from their
sites. The benefit would be more eyes on the skin and thus improvements
would be sent back to you.
Unfortunately, we have not exploited this feature. Now is the time for
us to do so, and your skin can be the first example of that feature
(would you believe it was added in 0.5 and we still don't use it - shame
on us)
I think Forrest should accept your skin package in one form or another,
the question is how, I see our options as:
1. Forrest accepts the skin and keeps it in SVN
I am -0 on this. We need to would then be forced to maintain the skin
and ensure that it is "correct" in the sense of everything is done the
right way. I would prefer we only maintain the one skin in our core and
utilise the skin packaging system in order to add more skins.
2. We make all non-core skins available via a skins sub project within
Forrest
In this instance we would create a new project for contributed skins.
Anyone donating a skin will automatically get commit access to this
sub-project (but not to Forrest itself).
I am +1 for this if it is possible within the Apache Infrastructure. It
ensures that there will be at least one person with commit access with a
vested interest in maintaining the skin and in applying any contributed
patches.
Does the way our SVN is set up allow this?
3. The skin author makes it available via a ZIP download using the
skin-package system
I am +0 for this. I would prefer to see a solution that makes the skin
available through a version control mechanism to simplify patches. If
only a skin-package zip is provided it will make it difficult for people
to contribute to the skin.
4. The skin author donates the skin to an external Open Source project
and uses that projects CVS/SVN etc.
This is kind of a half way house between option 2 and option 3. In the
past we tried to set-up a Sourceforge project for this, but it was
rejected as the project would not generate program code. I will offer
the Burrokeet project on SF since this uses Forrest at its core so the
housing of Forrest skins is appropriate within that project. I do not
have any problems adding skin contributors to that project to ensure
they have commit access. Of course, there may be other projects that are
appropriate.
---
Whatever we do, we should encourage the use of skin packages and we
should extend the system to list "official" skins in the same way the
plugin system does, see
http://forrest.apache.org/0.7/docs/plugins/index.html
Comments, ideas?
Ross
