How do we attract more graphic artists to TWiki platform?

Visual appeal has a huge effect on adoption of software, arguably more than even purely technical considerations. My one experience with this has been tracking "content management system" (CMS) packages. In particular, I have followed the rapid growth in popularity of Mambo (now Joomla) versus other CMS packages which, by many accounts, are superior on purely technical grounds. I suspect that a major factor in this was that, early on, Mambo gained a reputation for being relatively easy to develop custom skins for, which resulted in it attracting a very broad community of graphic designers offering both free and "premium" (commerical) skins.

I'd love to hear some ideas about how we can attract more graphic designers to work with TWiki. In particular, I'd like to hear from folks with graphics backgrounds about what we can do to make TWiki more attractive to designers, how we can specifically target outreach to this group, etc.

In my own experience and opinion, DakarRelease represents a huge step forward in simplifying the process of creating and managing custom TWiki skins. And I know we have more work to do in that area. But what, specifically, is most important to designers in this regards?

-- LynnwoodBrown - 23 Oct 2005

I guess that what is needed most is a cookbook about how to convert a graphic design (which often comes as a set of example HTML files with dummy texts) into TWiki's template system. I have recently created a "skin" which makes TWiki look almost exactly like my employer's intranet portal, and it has been a hard walk through the templates directory by trial and error.

-- HaraldJoerg - 25 Oct 2005

• Competitions seem to attract a lot of people, and some great logos have come out.
• How about approaching a few schools and suggesting a design project for final year students?
• Arthur and I have started looking at documenting the templates, with a view to simplifying the baseline for new skins.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 08 Nov 2005

IMHO, the best way to do this would be to de-couple the CSS bit from the TWiki bit. I've just been talking to some graphic designers who could potentially do some TWiki skinning for me but the learning curve from this side of Mount TWiki looks improbably steep. Would it be possible to have a topic that would guide graphic designers in such that they wouldn't have to learn very much about TWiki itself? (Apologies if such a topic already exists but it must be buried deep within the undergrowth of the Codev jungle.)

-- MichaelCorbett - 10 Sep 2007

Michael, thats one of the reasons I made the MoveableTypeSkin - most MT css works straight out of the box. (though it looks like I've turned off the demo on my site :/

-- SvenDowideit - 10 Sep 2007

That was the idea behind SimplifySkinCreation.

-- PeterThoeny - 11 Sep 2007

What I need is a solid tutorial that shows me how to convert my html/css document into a TWIKI template, and also how to enable rich text editing for content blocks. If such a tutorial existed and was easily accessible

-- CajetanBaptista - 08 Feb 2008

Cajetan - That is the more complex way to do it, although it is the approach I used to create MoveableTypeSkin. The easier approach (and probably more maintainable, unless you're a TWiki developer, would be to create css for an existing skin - in the case of MoveableTypeSkin, it uses the same html as the default moveabltype theme, so is quite re-usable.

-- SvenDowideit - 09 Feb 2008