The MCS Project has been almost dead since around February, and currently consists of a theme, a static HTML implementation of the theme and the rough beginnings of implementations for Drupal, MediaWiki, phpBB and WordPress. On the Danish Mozilla community web site, we want to use use MCS, because we want to upgrade our phpBB and MediaWiki, but we don't want to have all the work of upgrading their themes. MCS is a good opportunity for us to share that work with other Mozilla communities. In June in Geneve, we met with the German Firefox community, which also had plans to use MCS on their web site. We therefore agreed, that the Danish and German communities should bring the MCS project back to life and even lead the project if required.

Plans

Both the Danish and German community wants to focus on bringing MCS to a state, where it can be used on our respective web sites. For the Danish community that means a working phpBB and MediaWiki theme as well as a simple PHP theme. For the German community that means a working phpBB theme, and I cannot remember if it was Drupal or WordPress they used. Advanced things such as Single Sign On, OpenID and integrated search is not something we want to do right now.

Status

During the last weeks, I have worked on the HTML theme and the phpBB theme. Current work can be seen in the bug.

In the HTML theme I have converted Builder (a theme customization script) from PHP to JS, to improve performance. The two copies of the HTML theme (one of which included Builder and therefore did not work without PHP) had diverged too much, and I have therefore merged them into one. I have also reworked how Builder looks. (See the Builder button in the row below the site name)

The phpBB version of MCS was basically a 3½ page implemented and more than 70 pages remaining. To be fair, the 3½ pages already done was the biggest ones, but there was still a long way to go. During the last couple of weeks, I have almost finished the phpBB theme.

Help wanted

There is still a long way to go before MCS is useful. Please help out. You could work on a theme for one of the other systems, just like I did for phpBB, no graphical skills required.

If you do have graphical skills, I could very much use your help on the last touches of phpBB, as I have none whatsoever. Here is a buglist (the current Mozilla Europe Blog theme seems to screw up lists, so please imagine the bullets, if you do not read this in a feed reader):

• The color and size of the text (while looking very nice) made it unreadable for anyone above 40, and probably a lot of people below 40 also. I have tried to make it more readable, but probably made the layout less pretty while doing so. The font size also needs to be fixed on the main theme.
• Some of the headlines in the phpBB theme are squeezed tight against other elements and needs some air. Reply to a topic is a good example. I need help on how to do it and to decide how much space is needed.
• Tabs are used in the User Control Panel and Moderator Control Panel (Log in and then use the link in the top blue bar). I got the tab layout from the MCS Style Guide, but I don't have the background texture, and the styling of the tab content I have made up myself (which of course looks ugly). Getting a PNG from the Style Guide and styling the tab content is something I need help on.
• The breadcrumbs bar needs to be put somewhere nice.

So what are you waiting for? If you have graphical skills, you don't need to use more than a few minutes to tell me how to make the last touches of phpBB look good.

If you are interested in developing MCS or using MCS, please let me know.

Also: I need to get my changes pushed to the MCS repository. If you can do that, please help. They are on my own hg server.