New Ubuntu Website

[Matthew Nuzum]

You will soon see that the main www.ubuntu.com website has changed. It
has a new look and is now based on the drupal CMS.

I know that many of you like to modify your sites to match the
www.ubuntu.com site.

I currently have a drupal theme available that I'm happy to share with
you. Soon I'll have a moin theme and a plain HTML file as well. Also,
I'll make available graphics in an editable format (photoshop or Gimp)
so that you can customize the graphics.

Soon, as we get closer to the release for 7.04 I'll begin communicating
with you all in order to make it easier for non-english speakers to get
help, and that may possibly include detecting users configured browser
language and putting a link to an info page in their native language
atop the page of the website.

Here are a few requests I'd like to make:

First, we'd like to try and fix the problem of people going from one
ubuntu website to the next and having them look the same but function
differently. For example, in the old website, if you go from
www.ubuntu.com the tabs change. Go to help.ubuntu.com and they change
again. Therefore we'd like to maintain consistency across all the sites
that use the new theme by keeping the links at the top right of the page
the same. How best to do this in a multi-lingual environment is a good
question, do you have any suggestions?

Second, some sites have changed the Ubuntu logo. What we'd like to do is
limit the number of unique ubuntu logos and maintain consistency. This
is not a command, just a suggestion. But what we're going to encourage
is customizing the logo as seen here:
http://people.ubuntu.com/~mnuzum/projects/LogoExample.png

The normal logo, the normal Ubuntu title font and your site's name below
the title font, right aligned with the final u in Ubuntu.

Doing so will allow people to see that they have entered a new area, but
still feel like they're still at Ubuntu. Again, I'm open to discussion,
but the purpose is to provide consistency.

If you want to be one of the early adopters of the new theme, e-mail me
off list and I'll get you a link to my source.
-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode