First of all, THANKS Rhonda for pushing me to do that! I did plan to integrate the Debian menubar for a long time, but it never made it high enough on my todo lists up to now.

So, what am i talking about? For those of you who don’t follow debian-www@l.d.o too closely, there was a recent thread about debian.org’s page layout, where Rhonda pointed the initial poster to the layout proposals from Kalle Södermann. Rhonda was so kind and mainly documented in the recent blog post how to convert the gitweb theme to that layout.

I took that documentation and sat down Friday evening and converted the layout of my local instance of the DSA internal wiki to that new layout. While not everything looks perfect yet, it took me less than an hour. WOW, that was fast.

Now i became megalomaniac. After copying over the current list archive to an other machine (to not destroy the current archive while playing with mhonarc), I started playing with the same layout for lists.debian.org. The whole scripts for lists.debian.org were a bit more complex than the ikiwiki code we use for dsa.debian.org, but i managed to render usefull pages yesterday early morning.

Not everything was easyly convertable, and I still have some smaller issues to work on, but if you compare for example the following posting using the old and the new layout, i think we can use my work as basis for further improvements of the layout. Eg. i am aware that the new HTML  code does not fullly validate using the w3c validator.

Many thanks also go to Kalle, who responded to my problems with the CSS immediatly.

Not all lists are converted to the new layout yet, as a full list archive rebuild seems to run about 24 hours. Also i adjusted some minor stuff in the templates while the rebuild was running, so you will see some smaller differences in the breadcrumbs. That will go away when I start the next rebuild.

So what is next? Rhonda, do we want to see if we can take over qa.d.o? ;-)

PS: if someone wants to generate new icons for the thread view arrows, i am happy to integrate them.