I just noticed that GTK+ 2.10 has a GtkLinkButton, so maybe I can get to close bug 323323. My ideas is to add a link on the gnome theme manager to link to www.gnome.org/themes (does not exist yet!), that will point to art.gnome.org/themes
I think this would give the perfect excuse to clean up art.gnome.org a bit, and get rid of some of the old/ugly/broken themes. My goal for art.gnome.org would be a moderated high quality art resource, safe for work and safe for family. Hopefully (if I can fix bug 325300) then it can just have “complete” themes, covering all aspects the theme manager does.
What do people think about art.gnome.org? Is it time to give it a clean up, and point it in a clearer direction? I think it needs a unique selling point, and that should be that it only has very high quality themes.
There should be atleast one more link to gnome-look.org and not only to art.gnome.org
Great Idea, rock on!
What I always liked about art.gnome.org is the tighter control over the content. It’s much more convenient to browse through a managed set of a few themes rather than a huge library of themes of radically different quality. Good job! Thanks for all the past and future work, rock on!
Though some of the wallpapers are great I think they should be removed from art.gnome.org unless directly related to gnome.
Maybe this would have to be moderated incase someone adds a gnome logo to the bottom left corner of a leaf. There are just too many un-gnome related images.
I agree that a.g.o should focus on high quality themes. BUT, that should not exclude the possibility to post previews/work-in-progress since much of the theme work is evolutionary with respect to user comments.
If one is limited to publish only complete theme suites many great icon themes, for example, may not get the attention they deserve. An engine theme creator could very well be inspired by a fresh looking icon theme and hack away for the benefit of the whole community, and this aspect should not be taken lightly.
One solution could be to point http://www.gnome.org/themes to a section on a.g.o which contains “complete” themes and keep a.g.o more or less as is, perhaps with a higher degree of moderation.
An all in one theme archive format #325300 would be fantastic. Remember to support metacity-2 themes and wallpapers in the archive also.
Maybe this “all in one” format would warrant a new section on a.g.o (perhaps called System Theme or similar)
Agreed, I believe art.gnome.org should be a showcase for complete and polished themes that are easy to browse and install. gnome-look.org already does a good job as a “themeforge” for the theming community and I don’t think AGO can compete with it without a complete revamp (which would probably make it less userfriendly).
Focusing on complete theme sets seems like a great idea to me and would hopefully also filter out most of the “five-minute-edits” which only clutter the database. Additionally I hope it will de-emphasise wallpapers and GDM screens, which aren’t really GNOME specific but make up the majority of content on AGO. I even think that putting the GNOME logo on a random pretty picture only reduces its appeal and usefulness as a desktop background.
BTW, metacity-2 themes? I guess I have some googling to do. 🙂
i was never keen on any of the older looking themes, and icon themes need to work and cover more then a dozen items, complete themes is a good idea though there are many themes that are good but only do one or two components,
wallpapers are very erratic and i probably wouldnt accept any unless they were part of a theme package, same with gdm
gnome-look has that cluttered look and feel to it and i only go there if im looking for certain themes.
browsing art.gnome takes awhile too with the amount of items.
i dunno, it would be kinda hard to choose what everybody liked and if you had voting it probably wouldnt be right either.
Art gnome org has too high a ratio of wallpapers. It’s 90% wallpapers and a few themes. There are far better places to search for artwork online.
Drop the wallpapers and focus on good themes. Currently the quantity is too limited. There are many nice themes on gnome look that never make it to art gnome.
Metacity theme-2 is the updated theme format about to land on HEAD soonish…
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=102547
For me, art.gnome.org’s “unique selling point” always was its selection of high quality themes (and I’m proud to have Still Life amoing them). So, as GNOME and GTK+ advances, it’s always time to clean up and throw out incomplete and outdated themes.
SchAmane
There is a link in tutorials links (http://live.gnome.org/GnomeArt/Tutorials/UsefulLinks), a page with related stuff etc. development is in progress.
Cole at Tue Sep 26 2006 04:30
There is a problem thet developers won’t post new themes and there is a lot of ppl with wallpapers.
1] It is hard to refuse wallpapers, ppl don’t like it
2] When we will refuse the most of new wallpapers, we will have no updates :/
btw: no flower wallpapers will be accepted now
Pete at Tue Sep 26 2006 11:06
See above, ok, we are probably going to big cleanup and we refuse about 50% of new wallpapers now.
Anyway, wallpapers are also part of theming…
What about doing some sanity checking on themes that get uploaded?
Manu’s theme torturer could be very useful for this: http://wiki.laptop.org/index.php/GTK_for_OLPC#GTK_theme.2Fengine_torturer_and_crash_tester
You could wrap it in a short script which decompresses an uploaded archive, runs the torturer on it. If it gets all the way to the end without failing, then it’s passed at least basic sanity.
If the torturer is too CPU intensive, you could modify it to just leverage its basic sanity checking (if there isn’t an option to only do that already). If not, it’d be cool to display the performance metrics on the theme’s info page (right next to the averages of all themes, for context). As it is, some themes say they’re “lightweight”, but you have no way of quantifying it (or even knowing if it’s true).
And, of course, you could point to the torturer in a guide for theme designers (and discourage them to keep re-uploading to you just to run the torturer).
Thomas, would you like to coordinate / integrate the improvements to art.go with the http://www.gnome.org revamp?
art.go is the only GNOME subsite that will keep his position in the revamped General navigation bar. We expect many users landing to art.go from the wgo homepage and also from wgo > Get Started > Downloads (see the new wgo structure). It would be good to offer them a soft landing.
Since the GNOME art is colorful and spectacular, I’d like to see art.go with a more colorful and spectacular homepage and layout.
I agree with the many comments here about filtering all those nice images for non-GNOMEish backgrounds that, well, I can go to Flickr and pick myself. Instead, it would be interesting to showcase the artwork produce by the regular GNOME contributors. For instance, from time to time we see in the Planet a designer that has produced a very cool new icon, and he shows it kin full detail and big size. Even if I can’t install that icon as it is, I think it would have a place in art.go, even if published as news.
art.gnome.org should be the reference for all the artwork done around GNOME and not just a place for downloads, me thinks.
On the other side, the site accomploished very well its basic functions and it would probably survive the wgo 2.18 release just updating the general header. 🙂 Congratulations for your good work.
Love the idea. The site needs a rethink, and we definatly need to get ‘all-in-one’ themes sorted.