I got an e-mail last week from skippy asking if I could answer a few questions about the theme competitions I’ve held for WordPress. Here goes:
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What was your motivation for starting the competition?
The motivation for the first competition was to get people to start building additional themes for WordPress. I’d just created the style switcher, but there weren’t many styles to choose from.
The motivation for the second competition was again to help kick-start the creation of new themes for WordPress, themes that could take advantage of the new theme capabilities that had just been released in WP 1.5. I was also getting a lot of requests to hold a second competition from other WP users.
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Did you have sponsors or prizes lined up when you started?
A couple, then more came forward during the competition.
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What was the biggest roadblock to starting the competition?
Can’t really think of one.
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Once things got underway, what was the most unexpected challenge?
The first competition resulted in about 40 entries, and these required no code review on my part as they were only CSS changes. The second competition resulted in about 140 entries1 and the themes included PHP code along with CSS and image. I felt that since I was hosting the competition, I had a responsibility to review each entry and make sure there wasn’t any malicious or dangerous code included. I also cleaned up broken code in a number of submittions.
The submissions for the first competition took about 5 minutes each to package, review and post. The submissions for the second competition took 20-30 minutes each. The amount of time required to post each submission was the biggest surprise.
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Aside from a lot of cool themes, what has been the best thing to come out of the competition?
Not sure if it helped inspire the plugin competition or not, but if it did that’s certainly a good thing.
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Knowing what you know now, would you do it again?
Not in the same manner, no.
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If so, what would you do differently?
I would set up a way to let others do the reviewing and posting of the themes. Unfortunately. creating a system like that takes a good deal of time.
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Do you have any advice (specific or general) for anyone else looking to run a competition around some aspect of WordPress?
Yes. A few rotten apples will always raise their heads in a competition - make sure you don’t allow them to spoil the whole barrel. It’s rarely a good idea to cater to a vocal minority.
If you’ve got additional or follow-up questions, I’ll try to answer them in the comments.
- I’d expected maybe 80. [back]
Popularity: 6% [?]
stan adds this Comment:
great little questionaire. the theme browser is a great idea. nice site overall:)
June 27th, 2005 at 6:01 pm
ben adds this Comment:
I think everyone in the Wordpress Community owes you quite a thank-you, that was an amazing effort. Say 25 minutes per theme, that’s 2 and a half days of non-stop reviewing and uploading themes!
June 27th, 2005 at 8:29 pm
Roy Schestowitz adds this Comment:
Your commitment to maintaining this contest is what gave WordPress its drive. Themes are one of the main factors for people choosing WordPress. This includes myself. The few rotten apples will become vocal, but others forget to say “thank you”. So, I thank you now.
June 27th, 2005 at 9:29 pm
Alex adds this Comment:
Much appreciated gents.
June 27th, 2005 at 11:09 pm
skippy adds this Comment:
Thanks for the thorough response, Alex. Thanks also for your continued participation in the WordPress community.
A similar set of questions sent to Mark has confirmed that the plugin competition was directly inspired by your themes competition. =)
June 28th, 2005 at 5:11 am
Donncha O Caoimh adds this Comment:
You did a great job with the competition and the theme switcher!
I’m now even more interested since I can use WP themes myself
June 28th, 2005 at 6:40 am
erik adds this Comment:
so, if i’m getting you right there won’t be a next competition around here? so, whereelse could that be? i think the themes-section on wordpress.org itself isn’t running yet…
if there’s no competition in the near future can i submit themes to you?
thanks in advance! and thanks for promoting all of the themes!
July 4th, 2005 at 9:59 am
Alex adds this Comment:
I don’t think I said anywhere that I wouldn’t host another competition.
July 4th, 2005 at 10:00 am
erik adds this Comment:
July 4th, 2005 at 10:06 am
alexking.org: Blog adds this Trackback:
Herding Judges
I should have listed this as one of the challenges of running a competition.
In case the info is useful, the way I handled this was to have a pool of judges that reviewed everything. If some didn’t get have time to do the judging, that was fine …
July 12th, 2005 at 7:49 am
Anonymous adds this Comment:
Thanks for organizing and judging the contest! I know it was way more work than anyone realizes (as you said, it took much longer to post the submissions than you thought – 140 submissions times 30 minutes each…wow, when did you find the time?!). I think contests like this are a great way to both engage the programming community and provide services and/or scripts to everyone. I love the fact that not only did the winners get something out of this but we all got new Word Press themes! Everyone turns out the winner from something like this, which is great. I do wonder, though, about the fact that you cleaned up broken code in submissions. Shouldn’t it be the responsibility of the submitter to make certain that their code is working? If they submit broken code, isn’t that their problem?
July 25th, 2007 at 9:05 pm