New Features for the Themesite

[Domonoky]

Hello,

i am currently working a bit on the themesite. And i want to collect ideas on what could be improved on our themepage.

So if you as a user or theme creator have ideas on how to improve the themepage, please post them here, and if i like it, i might implement it :-)

EDIT:
Already done things:
- create a way to update themes for themecreators
- download counters
- userratings
- sorting by..
- bugfixes
- ability to view themes, not divided by targets.
- button to report a theme to admins for review.
- list theme features (rwps, font, etc ): Zipcontent is now listed on themedetail page.
- multiple screenshots
- copy download counter on update  (done by Kugel)

Already suggested things which i like (no garanties that i will work on them) :-) :
- grouping of very similar themes
- support for remote themes. Ie themes which only contain remote things, to make sharing remote skin files easier between targets.
- tags
- support for theme ressources
- somehow make greyscale screenshots possible for color themes on grey targets
- better upload page, which also tells for which targets a theme will be shown, and other infos.

[seani]

A few things spring to mind:

1. One main image, as the large version of multiple thumbnails, so that mouseover or clicking on the thumbnail alters the main image. An an arbitrary number of thumbnails in addition to the mandatory screenshot.

2. The ability to add multiple descriptive tags to a theme in the manner of YouTube categorisation (or the old winamp skins) and allow searching / browsing on those tags, e.g. "simple", "modern", "retro", "high contrast"

3. Ability to add links to related / derived / parent themes.

4. Ability for users to "watch" themes at the player level and receive notifications of additions or amendments.

[perfectdrug]

I would like to see a function that combines themes into one entry, for themes which has just altered colours. So that it is less clutter for one and the same theme with just different colours, taking up as many entries currently as alternate colourversions are from it.

[Ste-]

I would also second perfectdeugs idea.
For multiple themepacks. with just different backdrops in the wps cluttering up the current theme site.

An option for another wps image upload so you can show the wps with and without album art. just as an optional aside as some themes can be quite different without album art. so you can show, wps with aa, wps without aa and then the menu screenshot aswell.

[audio-i]

Downloads counter!

[seani]

Downloads counter!

Ah, good catch, which naturally suggests "User Ratings"

[soap]

I would like to see a function that combines themes into one entry, for themes which has just altered colours. So that it is less clutter for one and the same theme with just different colours, taking up as many entries currently as alternate colourversions are from it.

Thirded!


I would also like the ability to host theme "resources" (original images / artwork at full resolution) linkable from the theme's own description.

[seani]

Does it make sense to have two main routes into the site?

At the moment you pick your player and then view the themes available.

Maybe there's a case for also organising it as player within theme? That might be a natural way to record requests for model specific versions on a per-theme basis.

[Domonoky]

Downloads counter!

Done !

No historical data here, so they just start with 0 for now.

[pixelma]

My wishes or ideas for the theme site are more basic but probably much harder to implement.

1)
Being able to supply screenshots (itself) of themes that work in different colour depths and the subsite you are on is not the one the uploaded screenshot corresponds to. What I mean with this can be seen e.g. on the 160x128 greyscale and monochrome screen targets' pages (M:Robe100, H100, etc.) - you'll see colour screenshots there or grey ones because those are themes that will work on these targets but were made for e.g. the X5 with a colour screen.

I admit that I don't know how that should work - either "make" screenshots with simulators or so (but then you need to supply some dummy files or metadata and maybe the original author wouldn't like the screenshot his theme is demonstrated with) - or take the colour screenshot and use Rockbox somehow to scale down the colour depth like it probably would if you just take the bmp and "watch" it on the other target (not sure though if this works and would look like the theme on e.g. the greyscale target.

2)
A bit more independent handling of remote WPSs for two reasons: all of the current ones can be used on some targets as main WPSs (Iaudio remote for the X5 and M5 is the M3's main screen, the Iriver remotes' screen has the same resolution as the Sansa Clip and some ports in progress). My wish is that people with e.g. an M3 can have a choice out of every WPS which is made for this screen even when it is "hidden" as RWPS and vice versa - people with an Iriver remote could use a theme made for the Clip on that... problem with this is the font size though...  . This would probably also solve the small "problem" that people will get the RWPS if a theme has one even if they don't have a remote and additionally remote WPSs that come with an H300 theme could be used with an H100 and vice versa (again - if font size fits).

The way I imagine it from a UI point of view: no change for the targets which would use this as main WPS (only a bigger selection). For targets with remote: select your main theme and you'll be lead to a page with WPSs that would fit on the remote and the first selection being an RWPS that was made for the theme if the author provided one. (This might need some additional magic figuring out if the font size is the same as for the chosen main theme or the system font is used via viewport definitions so that the user would only get a choice of working remote WPSs - this sounds complicated...*)

I'm not sure but maybe the wpsbuild script which packages the SVN themes could be utilised for this? The themes are all .wps files in the source and then packaged as .rwps or .wps when the zip is made. Probably this needs a different way to upload RWPSs: either asking the author to upload them separately as wps or some logic to analyse if the uploaded theme contains an .rwps and to extract that - and supply extra screenshots (see 1....).

*) A bit offtopic for this thread but since it could simplify things here too:
This would be less of a problem if one day we could at least chose different fonts for remote and main screen.

P.S.: Sorry for lengthy post and I hope it's not too confusing.

[Domonoky]

Another one down. :-)

Users can now update their themes, if they submit a theme with the same name, author,email and lcdsize. The old one gets hidden when the uploader verifies the email.

[JdGordon]

nice work!
Just noticed a bug with the single theme page...
The "works with release" line doesnt show the version number, and it looks like a space is removed in the submitter and submitted lines. i.e look at http://themes.rockbox.org/index.php?themeid=347&target=e200 and then at the e200 theme page.

my requests:
1) have themes list their features, i.e wps, rwps, sbs, rsbs, extra font, background images, etc... probably need to make it collapsable or something..
2) obvious extension to download stats.. sort by downloads/age/author

[Domonoky]

The bug is fixed. If people find more such things, please tell me.

I just implemented "Rating" so thats another thing for which it would be nice to sort by.

[froggyman]

I just implemented "Rating" so thats another thing for which it would be nice to sort by.

You might want to consider only allowing one rating per IP address, or something like that. Otherwise people might start voting for their own multiple times (or voting negatively towards someone elses), giving a biased overall opinion on certain themes.

Not sure if this is possible or not, just and idea.

[Llorean]

Ratings are silly anyway. People have different tastes, so ratings are meaningless without a means to ensure you only see ratings by users who have the same tastes as you.

If someone wants to waste their time pumping up a theme's rating, let them. It's their life they're wasting. Anyone who actually cares about finding a good theme will probably ignore ratings and actually look at the screenshots.