Organizing the wiki page:WpsIpod5g

[ryran]

Hear hear.
I wholeheartedly agree with that.

[lights0ut]

Just an idea...

How about only including themes that work with an unpatched build, and have been tested as currently working with an SVN build.  Themes that are broken, or require patches would be moved to new pages (WpsIpod5gBroken and WpsIpod5gNeedPatches perhaps). 

This would obviously take time, but it would also help us to keep track of which themes need fixing up, and prevent the page being clogged up with themes that are useless to (SVN) Rockbox users.

pondlife

Rather than exclude themes which require a patched build, I think it would be better to clearly define what each theme requires. This would mean that every theme should state:
1.the required patches (if the theme works with svn then state no patches req'd)
2.what builds the author recommends (svn, specific unsupported builds)
and have this displayed in a Visual manner.

With regard to only including themes that are "currently working with svn" a visual representation of a theme's status (green for working, yellow for untested, red for broken)
along with what was used to test the build should be included in the theme description. There are changes in the code that have occurred which would cause a great deal of themes to be broken, or partially broken for some time (ex. stricter WPS parsing, RTC code changes) and would therefore cause drastic changes to the gallery. Broken themes should be identified and fixed rather than removed.

I have a few ideas floating in my head about how to organize a theme gallery for rockbox, so hopefully I can put them together into a mockup. I have little experience with web design, but I do know that there is a need for clarity when it comes to theme requirements, whether or not the theme is broken, licensing, and overall organization of a theme gallery. Just dealing with putting the iPod wiki gallery back in order has gotten me back in touch with these issues that I'm guessing a lot of users come across when customizing the look and feel of rockbox.

[Llorean]

I don't see why it's bad to exclude themes that require patched builds, because they are the OFFICIAL theme gallery. Someone else can always set up hosting for the unsupported themes, that way we have more clear separation so people don't keep asking us why themes don't work.

No matter how clear you make it, some people won't care to pay attention.

[lights0ut]

I don't see why it's bad to exclude themes that require patched builds, because they are the OFFICIAL theme gallery. Someone else can always set up hosting for the unsupported themes, that way we have more clear separation so people don't keep asking us why themes don't work.

No matter how clear you make it, some people won't care to pay attention.

Would a separate wiki gallery for unsupported themes be a valid option? I think that it would at least keep things within the wiki, without having to find a dedicated maintainer for the hosting of unsupported themes, while at the same time provide the clearest separation without physically separating the hosting.

Ultimately, this issue is up to the devs as they own the hosting, and they support the official rockbox. However, due to the volume of unsupported themes available I think they deserve a spot in the gallery rather than here and there on the web, or a 3rd party site. We already have two themes galleries but they are separated based on one that is strictly no copyright infringement vs. a more flexible stance on copyright. (ie the wiki vs. rockbox-themes.org)

[Llorean]

Why not simply encourage people to fix the remainder of the themes to be compatible with official Rockbox?

[psycho_maniac]

Just an idea...

How about only including themes that work with an unpatched build, and have been tested as currently working with an SVN build.  Themes that are broken, or require patches would be moved to new pages (WpsIpod5gBroken and WpsIpod5gNeedPatches perhaps).  

This would obviously take time, but it would also help us to keep track of which themes need fixing up, and prevent the page being clogged up with themes that are useless to (SVN) Rockbox users.

pondlife

I totally agree with this idea

[lights0ut]

Why not simply encourage people to fix the remainder of the themes to be compatible with official Rockbox?

Good point. How about this:

Wpsgallery > wpsipod5G --- > wpsipod5G-SVN
                                        \  > wpsipod5G-Unsupported

This way wpsipod5G could be left as an intro page with a short blurb explaining the 2 links and encouraging people to fix the unsupported themes to work with official rockbox.

On a separate note here is a mockup I've put together for a future WPS gallery (not necessarily the wiki)

[ryran]

Hey Gary.
I just went to the page for the first time in a long while and noticed an inline animated gif that was more than 1mb. So I replaced it with a png and a link to the gif. The other gifs on the page (maybe only phk) aren't THAT big but they're a lot bigger than the 10-50kb static pngs. I'd recommend we make a note about no embedded gifs and request that people link them instead (and update the ones that are already there to reflect that).

If no one else does it I suppose I will....

[lights0ut]

Agreed, looking at the numbers, 1MB is a significant % of the total data load when it comes to images on gallery. Having a "no embedded gifs" rule might upset a few themers that like to do animation, so maybe just restricting the size to less than 256kB would do?

[ryran]

The page is already ridiculously huge--I say just make them links. It would shave off a couple MB. That's significant.

[scorche]

Would a separate wiki gallery for unsupported themes be a valid option? I think that it would at least keep things within the wiki, without having to find a dedicated maintainer for the hosting of unsupported themes, while at the same time provide the clearest separation without physically separating the hosting.

Ultimately, this issue is up to the devs as they own the hosting, and they support the official rockbox. However, due to the volume of unsupported themes available I think they deserve a spot in the gallery rather than here and there on the web, or a 3rd party site. We already have two themes galleries but they are separated based on one that is strictly no copyright infringement vs. a more flexible stance on copyright. (ie the wiki vs. rockbox-themes.org)

Just as a note to add to the discussion, as you may know, I have had the new theme repository (will replace both the wiki and rockbox-themes.org) ready for quite some time now and have just been waiting for a good time to deploy it.  Currently it is planned to go live when viewports-in-wps gets committed so that the themes that will be submitted will all be compatible and to lessen the number of themes to be removed because of incompatibility.

Regarding your mock-up, the new repository looks almost identical to the current rockbox-themes.org site (as it is based on its code).  If we went with something more like your mock-up, the page would be very large and even if we trimmed it down to X themes per page, I think it would just get annoying to have to go through a lot of pages.  I also think that we would have people that would "update" their theme quite often or name their theme (depending on the sorting choices) in a larger effort to be "on the first page".