MozillaZine

Design Help Wanted for quality.mozilla.org

Wednesday October 18th, 2006

Jay Patel writes: "The Mozilla QA team and community need a new home on the web (we still have http://www.mozilla.org/quality, but it's a bit outdated and wikis just don't look pretty)... so we've started planning for QMO (http://quality.mozilla.org).

"Right now the site is a basic WordPress blog setup... but we hope to change that with the help of our community! We are looking for talented web designers and artists to help us design a WordPress tbheme and/or webpage templates that will transform QMO into a well designed, user friendly, and exciting website to visit. We hope QMO will give our users a central place to come to learn more about QA, work better together, and find new ways to get involved in the Mozilla community.

"I'm no artist, and I'm fairly new to WordPress, so I have failed miserably in trying to put a theme together myself. I did find one 'Firefox' theme, but it was based on Firefox 1.0 art and just didn't feel quite right for QMO. Please help us by coming up with fresh new designs and send your themes/templates to qmo@mozilla.org with 'QMO Theme' as the subject.

"More info about our plans for QMO can be found at http://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozilla_QA_Community:QMO_Design. It is the best place to keep notes and track progress as we work together to make QMO a reality! Please feel free to add your ideas there and comments there.

"If we decide to use your theme for QMO, you will be our first QMO Hall of Fame member and will receive a special gift from the Mozilla QA team. :-) Thanks for reading and start sending us some cool ideas. We look forward to seeing all of your great designs!"

#1 Questions

by jabcreations

Thursday October 19th, 2006 4:38 PM

1.) What (if any) serverside languages will be used? (IE, PHP, Perl, etc)

2.) What is more important: advanced layout or backwards computability?

3.) If both are desired from question 2 how does Netscape 4, Opera 5, IE 5+, and all Geckos supported sound?

#2 Re: Questions

by jaypatel

Thursday October 19th, 2006 4:54 PM

Hey jabcreations.

1. The site will be built around a WordPress blog, so we will be starting off with a them built for WordPress, and then will be created mostly static web content. We hope to build dynamic web apps in the future, but for now no serverside languages will be used.

2. The overall layout, color sets, graphics, and content are the most important pieces for QMO at this time... we just want to get something up that is presentable and has the foundation we need to build on top of.

3. We don't want to get too fancy with sound and multimedia just yet, so I don't see any issues with browser compatibility.

Thanks for your questions, hopefully I have answered them for ya. :-) - Jay

#10 Re: Re: Questions

by factoryjoe

Wednesday October 25th, 2006 12:16 AM

I'd recommend that you start with the hAtom-compliant <a href="http://www.plaintxt.org/themes/sandbox/">Sandbox theme</a>. It's very simple, well coded, and lots of new Wordpress themes will be built on top of it (meaning lots of styles to choose from).

#6 Re: Questions

by BenoitRen

Monday October 23rd, 2006 12:13 PM

Sounds on a website should be avoided at all costs. Though you may get away with it on a site where the subject is some multimedia thing like a video game.

#12 Re: Re: Questions

by anonym

Sunday October 29th, 2006 8:39 AM

I think what he meant by "If both are desired from question 2 how does Netscape 4, Opera 5, IE 5+, and all Geckos supported sound" means, if he is to create the site, and it would support all those browsers, what do you think about it, is it too much? I'm 120% sure he doesn't meant anything about making the site emitting frequencies from the speaker.

#3 Why a new site?

by Gerv

Friday October 20th, 2006 6:26 AM

"Our old web pages are outdated, so..."

Normal response to that would be "we'll update them". But here, it seems to be "we'll set up an entire new website, which needs a lot of things (like admin, visual design etc.) doing which aren't QA."

I'm not saying the www.mozilla.org site system is perfect, but why reinvent the wheel?

#8 Re: Why a new site?

by mlefevre

Tuesday October 24th, 2006 10:04 AM

"I'm not saying the <http://www.mozilla.org> site system is perfect"

It isn't perfect - I don't think one could even say it was good, and there doesn't seem to be any prospect of changing anything without involving large numbers of people in lots of discussions over a long period of time. And they don't want to reinvent the wheel really, just to take a different wheel design and paint it themselves. Maybe unfortunate, but I guess it could be quicker and easier to get a new wheel in for a specific task than to try and collaborate on the ultimate superwheel which could potentially do the job of all other wheels better than any wheel ever has.

#4 I don't like this move.

by BenoitRen

Friday October 20th, 2006 9:52 AM

People who do QA should do QA instead of worrying about a website. Each project has a QA weblog anyway, so why make a new website when the old one is barely used? I don't think there's a new one.

From the mention of a tried Firefox theme, I'm worried that QA will be Firefoxified. Leave Firefox out of this. QA does all the projects, especially Gecko.

#5 I can do it

by owahab

Sunday October 22nd, 2006 9:46 AM

Hi guys, in the Spreadfirefox Mozilla used Drupal, why not repeat it? Drupal by far is better than WordPress, since Drupal is more than a blog or even a CMS. If you are OK with Drupal idea, I will design, install, develop and maintain http://quality.mozilla.org for free. You can check out my resume: http://owahab.com/Omar And here's my Drupal account: http://drupal.org/user/75702 Let me know what you think: owahab@gmail.com

#7 Re: I can do it

by BenoitRen

Monday October 23rd, 2006 12:15 PM

As far as I can see, Drupal is not standards-compliant.

#9 Depends on Drupal themes

by factoryjoe

Wednesday October 25th, 2006 12:14 AM

Drupal, out of the box, is standards-compliant. But whether your installation is depends on the theme you've chosen, as it's up to the designer to adhere to web standards.

When I was more involved with Drupal, standards-compliance was a pretty high priority of the devs.

#11 Re: Depends on Drupal themes

by BenoitRen

Wednesday October 25th, 2006 4:39 PM

I see. It's a sad thing then that SpreadFirefox isn't standards-compliant.

#13 QA on the request....

by Tiff

Sunday October 29th, 2006 9:24 PM

Hi Mozilla,

Wonder if anyone has noticed (and could maybe update?), second paragraph, word after WordPress is not spelt correctly. An unnecessary b in there.

Loving the browser though.

Tiff