Eric Jansson has self-archived "DSpace Manakin UI: Case Study of Value and Costs" in the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education's repository.
Here's an excerpt from:
Our experience in this project pointed towards three main ideas:
- Many smaller institutions are staffed sufficiently to use the Manakin technology for branding and interface tweaking, as they can leverage web development skills, providing that system administration support for maintaining a development DSpace is available.
- Development of advanced Manakin themes (defined as development that significantly alters, removes, or rearranges interface components, or that integrates new functionality into the interfaces) is comparable to web-application development in terms of complexity. As such, more advanced development is only likely to succeed for institutions whose staffing includes a dedicated expert in web application development, and one who is familiar with XML technologies (i.e. XML, XPath, XSL), and possibly AJAX, and Javascript.
- Smaller institutions with more advanced goals should consider working together and using outside expertise in theme development. Outside expertise could be supplied through partnering with other institutions pursuing Manakin development projects or through vendors.
Read more about it at "Using Manakin to Expand the Capabilities of DSpace Repositories."