After my talk at Scale 4x, the Southern California Linux Expo, Roy Rubin from Varien got in touch with me. A synposis of what he said was "The Zend Framework is very exciting, but its Web site is not". He was being polite as I'm sure he really want to say "Your Web site's look sucks".
In the spirit of community, Roy offered to contribute to the Zend Framework by having his team help with a new design. From seeing the sketches it was clear that Varien could deliver something far more appealing (a.k.a sexy) than what we had created. So after hard work by them and Mike from the framework team, we've almost got it done.
In the spirit of release early, release often, we've decided to launch it a tad bit prior to its completion. We still have some work to do in order to get the manual integrated into the new site. The new manual look is MUCH nicer. So sorry, it looks a bit weird, but actually it's kind of cool in that it allows you to jump between the old and new look and actually see the huge difference in what the Varien team did.
Another thing we REALLY wanted to have done for the launch was a bug tracker. It's still top priority and we'll hopefully be able to launch that in the coming days (using the new look of course).
So I'd like to thank everyone who helped on this project especially Ben Blumenfeld and his team who did the design. It shows how outside contributions can make a big difference.
