I'm on the lookout for a redesign of the IssueTrackerProduct. Not necessarily a complete redesign but its css and general looks need a serious upgrade. Sure it's built with web standards which means that all that is needed is to change some CSS, but in reality it's harder than that. I think I want to keep the general layout except that when you view a particular issue and I no longer want to center the issue and the followups and I want to have the options such as Subscription and Tell-a-friend in a right-hand menu.
The problem is that of inspiration. All good design I see on Zen Garden is for content that is very different from the issuetracker. For example, the issuetrackerproduct design must bare to do both the issueview and the List Issues which requires the whole screen. It just seems that all good design is made for web blogs which is very far from the issuetracker. I want to see design that is using up 100% of the screensize yet manages to not make the textwidth unreadably wide. Some of these narrow designs can be very nice looking but that's not what I'm after now.
The fonts might need to change too. Personally I'm quite happy with the fonts of the www.issuetrackerproduct.com and the general typographics of that site.
The grey needs to go. It's a tad too dull even though it's tone-difference makes for a good medium to deliver information. (grey'er means headline) But what colours can I use? ...without making it standing out too much (in other words, no orange or pink).
Please help me come up with some ideas. I guess a good start would be to revamp the headline with a new tabbed menu. Any ideas anyone?
Comments
Peter:
Great idea the Zope-Plone world needs some serious Art. Zen Garden's style and looks would be a great addition to your product and the Zope environment. Zope CSS Art is a great idea unless I missed that feature and it is already there, somewhere.
God, could you to Zen Garden for Plone, in my opinion its home page has the appeal of a Company steel desk. The only way to change that face is a rewrite of the main_template and skins. I brought up the 'Ugly' issue on the Plone lists and it was not received well at all. I was called a Troll, who knows what that is and frankly who cares.
I wanted to use Plone to supply my web services site with dynamic web pages and pieces, user accounts, edited information, and backend storage services. I was thinking incorrectly I could use Plone's applets to get my site running very very fast but Plone is only a total buy into application. You can't pick what you want unless you do a major rebuild using main_template. That means building a new skin manually, which is the opposite of Zope's dynamic content creation model.
I've spend a month digging around the Zope-Plone internals to make the smallest changes to Plone's face and I'm getting fed up. It's not just the technical research but the culture that surrounds the Plone. These remarks are similar to those from http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200503/content_management_with_plone/
Wouldn't be great to have a Zope-Plone content type editor hooked into popular XML, XHTML editors that would fit the pieces to a J2EE Servlets, JSP's, etc. I'm clearly a dreamer.
I'm now looking at Apache's Lenya project and JAVA J2EE combination just to get going. I really wanted to use Zope-Plone & Twistedmatrix.org for distributed and interactive online services for Small Business. Zope's ZODB is a useful object base but I feel like I'm straight jacketed into its way of doing things. Maybe it's the documentation
If you can bring Art to Zope-Plone you will be a Zope God. I wish you luck.