migrate hosting of magarena theme to github about magarena

[lodici]

All themes should be consolidated into the Magarena Themes sub-forum where they will be more visible and accessible and hopefully inspire other people to contribute.

[melvinzhang]

Sure, we should do that as well, and it is a nice way to publicize them. The repo here is for archival purposes.

I think having a consolidated page where all the themes can be viewed would also be very helpful for users looking for themes to try out, something like https://github.com/magarena/magarena/wiki/ThemesScreenshots with links to download.

[lodici]

One minute you talk about the repo being for archival purposes then you want to add a "promotion" page of screen-shots no-one will ever see. It is not consolidation if, like alot of things in Magarena, there is more than one place to find stuff. It makes no sense when there is a dedicated sub-forum containing themes contributed by users to add yet another location with other themes that can only be updated with a github account.

I don't quite understand your aversion to using the forum but the forum is where most people discover Magarena and where the download links are, therefore the forum will be the single point of contact for most people. The lack of activity in the forum which I believe is down in no small part to this lack of focus on where information should be kept means that very soon Magarena will be dropping down below XMage in the forum list which is disappointing.

[melvinzhang]

You seem to think themes are to be updated on github, that is not the intention. The repo is mean to be a place to host the theme source and zip files, so we can have a stable clean URL to download them from. Just like how magarena releases are hosted on github for a while now, but we announce them on the google code homepage and on the forum. Since we host magarena zip files on github, I found it easier to do the same for the zip files for the themes as I have scripts that can do the upload automatically using github API.

I do like the forum for discussing new features and sharing user created content like card scripts and themes. I don't think it is the best way for new users to find themes, when you have to click through several different posts, each post is formatted differently and the screenshots are small unless you click to expand them. I think having a wiki page (linked from the main website) with screenshots and links will be more effective. Btw, the page is not maintained or created by me, I just moved its content over from the google code wiki and found it to be nice place to showcase the concept of themes.

I don't see why we can't have both, a clean simple gallery of themes to introduce new users to themes and a subforum with more themes. The wiki page will include a link to the subforum, where you can find more themes and share the ones you created.

[melvinzhang]

Completed. Zip files for themes can be downloaded from https://github.com/magarena/magarena-themes/releases/download/1.0/blackswamp_theme.zip etc