art.ubuntu.com

[Henrik Nilsen Omma <henrik ubuntu com>]

The ubuntu art website is now functional at http://69.60.114.112/ . 
Please have a look, try uploading some artwork and give feedback/report 
bug here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuArtWebsite I'll announce it more 
widely once the real domain name gets forwarded (art.ubuntu.com). Also 
good news is that the maintainer of the art.gnome.org site has accepted 
the first of my patches, which means we should have a good chance of 
staying in sync as we go forward :)

Working with the site has raised some questions for me about main 
purpose(s) of it. I see two main needs, and hopefully we can make the 
site meet both of them.

* The first is as a collaboration tool for the art team and a simple and 
friendly entry-point for new artists. In addition we also use the wiki, 
the mailing list, IRC and forum (does the art team use the forum much?) 

* The other very important function for the art.ubuntu.com website is as 
a first port of call for average users looking for cool artwork for 
their desktop. This should be possible now that we have a nice front-end 
to the site. If this turns out well, we can link to it from the ubuntu 
website and even from default bookmarks in the browser (though many will 
end up going there even if we don't, so it really needs to meet this need).

However, there may be a slight conflict with the first goal. On an 
artwork collaboration site we want people to submit lots of stuff, even 
if it's work in progress and then comments can be made and the item can 
be tweaked. The end user wants a few high-quality items to choose from 
(by which I mean 100 of each type, as opposed to 1000). There is of 
course the ranking system, but that may not be enough. Perhaps we can 
add a slashdot-like user setting where you have to actively select a 
level of stars you want to view artwork at, which would default to one, 
so that casual users will only see items with one or more stars. This is 
not urgent while we have little content, but that may change quickly.

We also want stuff that the end-user downloads to work. I've downloaded 
several themes from art.gnome.org that won't install. Is this a gnome 
version issue (ie. which version was it made for?) or are some just 
broken? In either case, should we consider sorting themes by the 
_Ubuntu_ release version that they are tested to work with. ATM admin 
approve submissions by whether they are suitable, not in breach of 
copyright, etc. but perhaps we should also have a way of denoting that 
it has been tested on a certain release, that icon sets are complete, etc.

- Henrik