It's getting on 2 months ago that GuideGatineau users voted on a new look. Often with a WordPress blog changing the look takes only a few clicks, so what's the delay?
Here's the chain we're moving through.
1) GuideGatineau isn't a "regular" WordPress site, it uses BuddyPress which needs special "themes" (that's the look).
2) We're doing a custom theme (partly because few to none free themes exist yet for BuddyPress) and that takes time.
3) While we're working on this BuddyPress is shifting beneath our feet. While WordPress is fairly mature software, BuddyPress is in early days. For instance the BuddyPress roadmap predicted version 1.2 would include stronger privacy controls. Instead the open source development community saw an opportunity in greater interactivity with site users and that's where their effort has gone for 1.2.
4) We'll see a stable BuddyPress 1.2 in February
5) We'll need to install that on our test server to make sure things don't break for GuideGatineau.
6) We'll code the new look (theme) to fit BuddyPress 1.2 and test that too.
7) To make GuideGatineau bilingual we then need to reproduce the theme with all the buttons and labels in French (I'm thrilled to report that we've already had several offers of help in making the site bilingual.)
The new look theme will then be moved to the GuideGatineau site and hopefully nothing will break too badly because of the change.
9) Some content, like videos, will begin to show up in both languages and other things, like user generated material, will accumulate uniligually as the user produces it.
You'll notice that the new look doesn't appear where we want it until step (8). So although I'd like to move faster, it looks like it will be a while yet before we get there.
