[OH-Publicity] Request for comments: Coming changes to blog theme

[Asheesh Laroia]

Hello dear OH-Publicity,

There are three big changes to the blog theme that I think are a good 
idea, and I wanted to share them now and see if people have comments 
before taking the biggest one live.

First: (already done) Toward the top of http://openhatch.org/blog/ there 
is a big "Subscribe" icon. This links to our feed, which is in Feedburner.

Second: (already done) Underneath the feed icon, there is a "Subscribe to 
our monthly newsletter" link. This POSTs to our Mailman list called 
"announce". We'll (manually, at first) send our monthly newsletter to the 
"announce" list. (In the future, maybe we can do something cool with 
CiviCRM or other magic.)

Third: (To be done when Karen approves the UI changes) I'd like the 
OpenHatch blog to adopt the same layout as the main site. For a while, 
we've had periodic blog design breakage because it was error-prone to keep 
the WordPress theme in step with changes in the main site CSS. As per 
https://openhatch.org/bugs/issue752 , I wrote some tooling so we can 
automatically convert OpenHatch Django theme changes into WordPress 
themes, so that we avoid this problem.

The new WordPress blog will look like any two-column OpenHatch page, and 
the left column will be the current left column of the blog; the right 
column will naturally be posts and comments. The important differences are 
that we'll get the top black bar labeled "OpenHatch" and the bottom 
navigation will get sync'd.

(This does mean we'd lose the hand-written "OpenHatch blog" image at the 
top. It also means we'd lose the translucency of the current content boxes 
on the blog. I think that's okay.)

In my current version of the new blog theme, the top navigation bar from 
the OpenHatch site (that says "log in / sign up | people | projects | 
events | training | donate") will not be present on blog pages, since 
that's mostly not relevant to the blog.

It's been really great to see so many different community outreach efforts 
highlighted via the OpenHatch blog, and I hope we continue to see that! So 
I thought I'd make sure to let this list know before taking that live. I 
also want to honor all those people's efforts by making sure the blog 
theme never again ends up with bad styling problems.

-- Asheesh.