Backstory: My sister Amanda has been learning Drupal theming in her spare time for the past year. She also got some formal Drupal module and theme training, and attended the Design 4 Drupal Camp this past June in Boston. She's close to being finished with a theme she wants to contribute, a CVS account was the next logical step. Today she sent me an e-mail pointing me to the the link where she requested her CVS account. Although her account was approved, and regardless of issues that were brought up, I found the way the issue was handled was wrong, so I tweeted about it:
Wow, this is some 3rd degree to contrib a Drupal theme:http://bit.ly/dAqyy Wonder if people give up/get scared away. #drupal #d4d
If we are serious about wanting better themes and embracing the design community, this is the wrong way to go about it. It's not welcoming or encouraging, and it's not the place for such a review to take place in my opinion. A much better option would be the theme's issue queue after it has actually been released and that CVS hurdle has been overcome. If this had been me applying for a CVS account back then, and I was met back with responses like this I might not be here today. Why risk scaring people away like this?
My tweet sparked a much bigger discussion that continued on in #drupal-design in IRC and eventually ended up in the awesome Design for Drupal community coming together to try and setup some goals and a path forward for Design and front-end related contributions. In a matter of a few hours, we started defining some goals, @modulist offered up his designfordrupal.org domain, and @marcomatic got Open Atrium up and running for us, which is awesome!
The site is only a couple of hours old, so it's obviously a work in progress, but we are in there getting our goals in order for what we need as a community and we are going to hash it out and get on track to improve the situation.
Our Mission:
To lower the barrier for designers to start working with Drupal. To make it easier and more rewarding for designers to contribute back to Drupal
If you want to help, please sign up and get involved:
http://project.designfordrupal.org
Hi, my name is Jacine. I do Drupal theming and development for Gravitek Labs.
Lanesa
I'm not suprised at all by this which is why I have not applied for an account. NO ONE WILL CONTRIBUTE BACK if veteran themers don't embrace new themers.
There's nothing wrong with positive criticism. We all can stand room for improvement in some areas. In fact, I'm sure there are many web and usibility designers that can come along and look at at some of the themes that have already been created by themers in contrib and criticize the lack of Photoshop, GIMP, Illustrator or CSS skills.
I agree 100% that regardless of who it is coming to the community whether it's developer or themer, issues should be handled in the issue queue.
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