Thoughts on championing OOTB themes

I was not at the summit, and as a result haven't gotten a lot of information on what's expected from me to improve the theming story for Plone, but I have a few ideas here and would love feedback.

1) Identify the key players we need to round up for this. I'm thinking David Convent, Alex Limi, Donna Snow, Denis Mishunov, the 14 year old wunderkind I've been hearing about, and I'm sure there are more. Maybe the folks at Quinta Group? I think we should also identify some designers, or determine if we're going to liberate Wordpress or other similar free themes. I'm not a huge fan of most of those themes, as most of them seem very ugly or too dumbed down, but I could be talked into using them.

2) Create a dedicated theming section of the site and pull in select theming docs there. Break it down into 2.5 and 3.0 so that it's clear, and keep a link to other theming resources in the docs section. I'm thinking that we narrow the field here and point them to the core docs. Possible visual change to that section with thumbnails illustrating what the skins look like. I'm thinking something over the top here, a la csszengarden.com. There has long been a perception that the only thing you can do to easily theme a Plone site is change the color of the tabs, and I want to break that perception. At the very least, we need to make this page show thumbnails of available themes: http://plone.org/products/by-category/themes

3) Possible sprint? I'd rather not do a virtual sprint, as I think the in-person sprints are more successful, but we have to also be aware of where our skinners live -- on opposite sides of the ocean. Is there any interest here on this? I'm flexible to leave the country, but I know that many people are not, due to having families.

4) Review the competition and see what they're up to in their theming sections. There may be some interesting ideas we could borrow.

5) Put together some best practices to make sure that users don't have to do any internal tweaking to make a skin work. I'm thinking specifically instructions on how to use GS properly when building skins, plus a "right way" forward -- buildout vs the unified installer. I'm still not sold on buildout, and this warrants some real discussion. Designers and skinners don't need all of the overhead that buildout brings with it, and maybe buildout isn't appropriate?

6) Joel Burton mentioned a skinning contest, but I'm a little wary of this. What do other people think? I just don't know how successful these things are, or what we would offer as a prize.

Next steps are to get general feedback and additional thoughts. After that, I'd like to put together a final list of action items, set a timeline and establish owners. I believe it was Donna who pointed out that 3.0 came out six months ago, and we don't have a solid 3.0 theming story or the organizational structure to support what we do currently have in place. I'd really like to see that change.

Thoughts?

- Veda