[development] New Themes for New Drupal

[Jeff Robbins]

I feel like I should chime in here and set the record straight on a  
few points that have been made in this thread.

First of all, the concept that "we should spend some money on this  
and get some designers involved":

I hate to stoop to pulling out resumes here, but I worked on these  
themes along with my wife Jennifer Niederst Robbins (go ahead...  
google her). And though I would not call myself exclusively a  
designer (though I have in the past), Jennifer and I both have a LOT  
of design experience. Nathan Haug graduated with a degree in fine art  
was hired on at Lullabot for his great skill as both a designer and  
web developer. And we've all put in quite a bit of paid time on  
these. So the idea of getting designers involved and spending some  
money is already underway.

Lullabot has developed Drupal themes for MTV, TWiT, Participant  
Productions, and others. A good standards-based CSS-compliant  
starting theme is something that we've needed every single time. It's  
something that we will use over and over, so I have no problem  
spending money, time, and resources on it.

I would also encourage those who feel that they have some design/CSS  
chops to get their hands dirty and come up with some other subthemes.  
After all, it's called "Zen" in homage to the CSS Zen Garden's "try  
it yourself" attitude.

The Zen theme is a framework for creating your own CSS-based themes.  
I would love nothing more than to see several hundred better CSS- 
based themes contributed and ready for release in Drupal 5.1. It  
would mean that we'd have that many designers realizing the potential  
of Drupal.

In the meantime, please consider whether this is an improvement over  
Bluemarine.