Cross posted from the mailing list:

We're in a bit of a lull at the moment, but I wanted to report on a few noteworthy things:

Denys Mishunov has released his webcouturier themes on Plone.org, and folks should definitely check them out, as they are probably the most sophisticated themes currently listed on plone.org. You can find them here:

http://plone.org/search?path=%2Fplone.org%2Fproducts&portal_type=PSCProject&SearchableText=webcouturier&Search=Search

Coming soon, there is also looking at making some changes to the plone3_theme recipe to only add support for the browser folder if you specify that you do indeed want documentation with your theme. This should resolve some of the issues people were having with themes output from the recipe being overly-complicated. (Trey, I don't know if you have an interest in talking about your ohtobe recipe here since it's still semi-untested, but chime in if you do.)

Skinning resources: David Convent is working on the theming chapter for the new integrators book being driven by Martin Aspeli, but collaborated on by a number of people. I believe it should be released around November, but don't quote me.

Next, there's a new skinning book in the works that I'll be working on, with the help of a handful of folks. I don't have a timeline on it yet, but I'll be putting that together soon and coordinating with the publisher.

Deliverance: There is some increased some noise around Deliverance. My understanding is that the way forward for it is chaning and Alexander Limi is trying to drive this in the direction of making it the tool we all hope it will be -- useful for all skinners, lightweight, and not requiring funky coding skills to make it run. The timeline is fairly far away on this, but it's good that proper thought is being put into this.

Gloworm now works on 3.1. For those of you who don't know what it is, it's a debugging tool to help with skinning. Check it out into src/ using https://weblion.psu.edu/svn/weblion/weblion/plone.app.gloworm/trunk/src
  plone.app.gloworm, add it as a development egg to your buildout, and 
install it to your plone site. It's still a little rough, but it can't hurt to have extra eyes on it.

For folks who are working on themes currently, keep at it. We're not on a firm deadline at the moment (partly because I've been sidetracked, and partly because we've been waiting on the plone.org upgrade to 3.0). Once that happens, the UI changes can happen and we'll get back to skinning more actively.

Lastly, don't forget to sign up for the skinning sprint at the October DC conference, if you haven't already (and so far, no one really has):

http://www.openplans.org/projects/plone-conference-2008-dc/theming