Hi all,

The next item on our infrastructure todo list has been to move the website over to Drupal. Inc is about ready to turn on the code, so next we'll need a Drupal-ified website theme.

It's amazing that despite three facelifts since Inkscape started, we've essentially kept the same underlying PHP bones of our website.

Unfortunately, as we've grown they've exhibited some problems:

1. Contributors must know SVN to add to or update the website 2. New content must be created in PHP 3. To roll out changes you need an SSH account on inkscape.org 4. Our news/rss setup is limited in features and breaks often 5. Due to the above, the site's content has gotten pretty stale

I'm very hopeful about our change, and think we'll be able to solve these issues well. In the year since we picked Drupal as the successor, I've been using Drupal to run my own personal website, and am finding it to be both easy to use, and very flexible and powerful.

So the plan going forward is:

A. Set up a demo site for folks to learn Drupal B. Test out Drupal's localization capabilities C. Start work on building up the site's content D. Design a new theme for the website E. Once we're ready/happy, cut over to the new site

We will be targeting the new Drupal 6.0 (currently in beta). Localization - one of our most critical requirements - has been a top focus for Drupal 6.0 development, so I'm sure it will meet our needs, but we need to test it thoroughly, to ensure our translators will be comfortable using it.

Regarding the content, I don't have any huge plans. As far as I'm concerned, we could move all the content into the wiki and manage it there. However, I've really enjoyed working in Drupal, and suspect that once people gain comfortability with it, they'll naturally want to build up content in it. But at this point, the news blog is my principle concern.

Now, for the website theme and look and feel, this is a good opportunity for us to explore some new ideas (even including sticking with our current look and feel, just Drupalifying it to fit Drupal's new capabilities). What we're looking for at this point are mockups that work with Drupal 6.0. If you're feeling creative, and wish to learn about making Drupal 6.0 themes, why not give it a shot?

Information on creating Drupal 6.0 themes is available here:

Theme Guide: http://drupal.org/node/171179 (under development) Porting Themes: http://drupal.org/update/theme

When you have a theme ready to propose, package it into a tarball and email it to Inc: inc@...1773...

Inc will add it to the demo site so folks can try it out as they work on content. Later on in a few months, right before we make the site switch, we'll hold a vote to select the best theme to be our default. Depending on if we get enough contributions, we can include the 2nd and 3rd place submissions as alternate themes.

Bryce