With the help of Lewis Nyman, Melissa Anderson, and Tatiana, we are continuing the work we started last month to make the BlueCheese theme more open to enable the community to contribute more easily.

Lewis has now separated out the trademarked and copyrighted elements from the BlueCheese theme. Our plan is to keep these elements in a private repository, but make the rest of the theme available to people working on Drupal.org improvements. Specific elements that were removed or changed include:

> The Drupal logo

> The colors indicated in the style guide

> A few background images and icons

The aim is to release a theme that, if someone decided to install it on a site (which is not our intent here), there's less chance of confusing users to believe they are on Drupal.org or related site. We won’t support this theme as generally installable. At the same time, we need to ensure that developers have enough elements of the theme that they can reliably understand how their code changes will affect the look and feel.

Now we need some input from you. This stripped down version of the theme is available on the development site (un/pw is drupal/drupal for the htaccess popup and you can’t log in because we sanitize both emails and password hashes). If you are doing any sort of development for Drupal.org, please take a look and let us know, will this version of the theme be enough to avoid any intellectual property disputes and what’s the best way to handle these changes while keeping the theme maintainable? Please record your findings and thoughts in the discussion already happening on groups.drupal.org.

We’re looking to get this wrapped up and out in the world ASAP, so please get your feedback to us by Friday, 27 December. We’ll work as quickly as possible to implement your feedback and create the new theme after that, keeping you posted on progress and dates in the issue queue. I hope this is just the first of many ways that the Association and the amazing volunteers like Lewis and Melissa can help eliminate barriers to contributions from the community across Drupal.org.