Gallery 2 Theme Contest

just curious if you folks accept 3rd-party prizes for a special category or an existing one?
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beef

scaturan: As a low level team member who has almost no say or authority, I strongly suspect that the brief answer is "yes" due to the "more categories to come" in the list of categories. So if an individual or a group would like to sponsor a category and is able to put up a "worthy" prize, I suspect the team would be happy to add it.

lvthunder: With the recent releases of both FF2 and IE7, I suspect those two are the majority of compatibility that is sought. IE6, Opera 9 and FF1.5 to a lesser extent, though perhaps IE6 should be ranked with and ahead of IE7 due to current install base.

IMHO, I would rank it in order of importance as: IE6, FF2, IE7, FF1.5, Opera 9, Safari, Konqueror?

update: valiant mentioned Safari and Konqueror on IRC.
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Describing IE6 as "recent" is incredulous. It came out almost 6 years ago. w t f?

Then let's call them common, modern webbrowsers.
Not supporting the browser that is used by far the most users must be "incredulous".

We know about the pain of designing websites that work in all major webbrowsers and that quite some time can go into fixing a design to work in IE, but it's a necessity.

Noone stops you from using such a theme for your website.

But Gallery as a project doesn't make IE6 users (80-90%) second class citizens.
No, this is not subject to discussion for this theme contest.

We'd welcome a flash based theme. Most users already have the flash player plugin and the plugin is available for most platforms our users are using.
There's a beta version for the v9 player for linux if you really need v8 or v9 features of flash.

sparr:
- You are talking about not supporting the browser which has maybe 80-90% market share now. (My guess: That will drop to maybe 40% in favor of IE7 by the end of January if all works well.)
- The other question whether to build a theme that works with flash player only. True, only very few professional websites offer only a flash version. Most also offer a much much appealing / complete HTML version as a fallback. But fact is that the market penetration of flash is very high and it offers some unique opportunities that cannot be done with HTML/CSS/JS alone. I don't believe adobe's numbers (http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/version_penetration.html), also they just exclude countries / regions they that wouldn't reflect well from the stats, but it's obvious that flash is installed almost everywhere and easy to install.
- And if you refer to flash player version 7 vs 9: Flash player usage statistics adopt to new versions much faster than IE usage statistics (see transition from IE5 to IE6). Upgrading to the latest flash version can also be done much quicker and easier than upgrading from IEx to IE7.

We'll never have a flash-only theme as the default theme in G2. And our default theme should also look (almost) the same for 9x% of all users. Thus we need to support IE6 for a while and flash can be used as an additional component. A pure flash theme would be a cool showcase and a nice addition to the collection of available G2 themes and G2 admins could offer a HTML theme as fallback.

Summary:
- As a general design rule or ideal, a HTML/JS/CSS theme should nicely degrade in browsers with less capabilities (be it less-standard, no-JS, no-CSS, ...).(1)
- Treating IE6 users as second class citizens while they still make by far the largest userbase is unrealistic. Obviously that's not in the interest of our users.
- A theme that requires JS (AJAX) has a right to exist as has a flash theme. Both are supported by a very wide userbase. But offering both without fallback for the xy% that cannot view such pages is not in the interest of your visitors. In G2, such a fallback be in the form of a switch to a different theme.

1) The Gallery plugin admin interface interface is a bad example. There's no degradation in case JS is disabled. We have a task to improve that.

You're oversimplifying.
In other words: The smaller the userbase is that you choose to ignore / not support with your theme, the better.
Ignoring IE6 is worse than only targeting flash because far more people are affected by the former choice.

It's also not black and white. If you read my posts and the theme contest page carefully, you'll see that your theme is not disqualified from the contest if you choose to not support IE6. You'll just lose some points that you can compensate for.

Yes, 2.2 support only is fine.

Let the numbers speak for themselves. We'll see in January and the near future how fast the actual adoption rates are. And we'll not just look at the USA/Europe.

I'm going to do a theme for people who want to show off pictures of there baby. Unfortiantly since I'm going to be using a few images it can't be colorpack compatible. I'm going to have to create a theme only color choice. I haven't done much yet because I've been working on another project.

When is the dead line of the contest ?

-= Cybunk Multimédia Conceptor =-
Interdisciplinary artist experiments with various media
video art label vidioatak

Just out of curiosity, how many themes have been submitted?

what exactly?

Hi,
My Colorpack will NOT be ready in time for the contest, but that doesn;t bother me. It is definitely being planned and will come about in time even if I have to learn the php module planning part myself.

I think it is time to state its name and have already described its intention of versatility and userbility (is that a word?)
As it will be geared to work in conjunction with the PG theme (the only one I use much now as it is so wonderfully versatile) I feel it should have "PG" in its name and hope Pedro will approve of that. MY current favourite idea for the name is "PGUselect". That seems fairly clearly to tell that the idea of the colorpack is for the User to select his/er own colour scheme.

I do realise that the techy development side is a bit more complex than I had at first thought, but there is some light at the end of that tunnel.

It has gone from being a dream to becoming a project.

Gaynor

>Does it mean that the plan is to offer users a way to select _any_ colorscheme based on a favourite color or something?<

Yes Joe.

PGUselect will enable users to state the "colour values" for their main colours (backgrounds, borders, text).
Its plugin will place a table at the “select color-pack” position in the Gallery’s Edit Album page, possibly with a link to a colour-picker chart to find the colour value numbers.

It will allow people to experiment right there in their gallery to see what works well – no longer the need to understand code, upload by ftp, etc to create a new colorpack.

Clearly this needs a plugin to adapt the Edit/Album page. ‘PGtheme settings’ has an interactive table for choosing the various backgrounds. I think (perhaps naively) it could be adapted for selecting colours, ...
but I don;t know php.

For now I am working on the colourpack part. I need a developer’s help with designing the plugin.

I am working on adding the interactive section to a customised version of one of Pedro’s colorpacks. Even my default PGUselect cpack will add to those available, with a brighter feel to it. I anticipate PGUselect (like PGs other colorpacks) being able to select colours for other themes that cannot take advantage of the rest of his theme's versatility.

Also to be offered in the PGUselect plugin (but only working with PGtheme and its derivatives) - I am working on some new semi-transparent 'bg images' to texture the background colours. These will be light and neutral and assume the chosen colouring -eg giving the texture of an old photo album page.

Gaynor (Realising that getting the ideas is the easy part!)

WOW ! IT is getting close to that day! About 10 days to go.

""Rules
Themes must be submitted via email in a tar.gz or zip file to gallerycontest+submissions@gmail.com with the submitter's name, contact email, phone number, location, and a description/feature list of the theme.
Themes submitted must be the intellectual property of the submitter (it has to be created by yourself).
Themes must function properly in all recent major browsers. [1]
By submitting a theme you agree to release the code as GPL under the Gallery Project.
Themes must be new, original, and should not be tightly based off of any themes released before this contest had begun.
You will get bonus points for including imageframes, colorpacks, and iconpacks with your theme.
Updated: Submission deadline is February 15th, 2007 at 11:59:59 PM Pacific
""

Please tell me what does "release the code as GPL under the Gallery Project" mean?

ie does it require special talents to do that?

Gaynor

Well I guess someone would help me with that part, if any of it is beyond me.

It all works with IE and FF, and I have asked for someone to check other browsers for me http://gallery.menalto.com/node/60236

And I have done the documentation.

So it should be ready in time.

And the most important things are:-
I am pleased with it,
I have enjoyed the project immensely,
and I think it will be very helpful to others.

Gaynor

Making a theme embeddable is not a 'must', it's just an option. To participate in the embedded section it is useful though. ;)
What you have outlined about removing sidebar, etc is just right, but it differs among integrations. In most of the cases they overwrite (some) css data too.

linkfelhő | Dog Gallery

See:
http://gallery.menalto.com/theme_contest_extended#comment-221792

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Doumentation: Support / Troubleshooting | Installation, Upgrade, Configuration and Usage

Submitted themes were tested, reviewed and the decision will be made very soon.
You can expect a news story in the next 72hours.

linkfelhő | Dog Gallery

Thanks Jacobbb for your comments regarding my NZDI theme. I will be releasing a version shortly that supports dynamic / keyword albums.

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NZ Digital Images | G2-Sites.com