WordPress 1.5 Themes

I’m pleased to announce the prize winners of year’s WordPress Theme Competition. However, I’d like to offer my sincere thanks to everyone who participated in the competition and helped spread the word about it. As many people have already said, real winners here are the WordPress users who have so many great themes to choose from.

You can take a look at all of the themes using the Theme Browser.

The Poobahs!

1. Grand Poobah - Connections
2. Plain Ol’ Poobah - Rin
3. Mini Poobah - Red Train

• Honorable Mention - Wuhan
• Honorable Mention - Orange Sky
• Honorable Mention - Green Marinee

Most Creative Design

1. Head (in a very close race)

This year, the judging was done by a panel of over 20 people that I selected. Each judge was asked to distribute 50 points among the designs they felt were most deserving (based on a wide range of criteria). While many entries received votes, these designs rose to the top. I will be contacting each of the above prize winners to send them their prizes.

The following prizes were judged by and will be distributed by their sponsors:

Random Draw Prize Winners

• Almodovar wins Web Standards Solutions
• Greenwood wins The Zen of CSS Design

Thanks Craig Hartel.

Pixel Perfect Design Prize Winner

• rdc* Theme
• FastTrack

Both theme authors win the two tiny icon set + expansion pack. Thanks Paul Jarvis.

Most Versatile Design

• Zen Minimalist (Gregory Auld)
• Sharepoint Like (Kimmo)
• LetterHead (Kimmo)
• Man~ja (Kimmo)

These winners receive gift certificates. Thanks Gregory Auld and Kimmo.

Global Appeal Prize Winner

• Almost Spring

Almost Spring wins $500! Thanks Weblogs.us.

Most like a Paper Diary Prize Winner

• Jakarta

Jakarta wins a $25 Amazon gift certificate. Thanks USONYX.NET.

Out of the Box prize

1. Head

Check-in Prize

• Fresh Bananas

There is one more theme that should be considered for the competition, however it isn’t listed here with the others. Denis Somar created “Taft” and submitted it on time to the proper address, etc. However - the initial submission was huge (1.7MB) so I asked him to see if he could bring it down in size. He’s cut it down to just over 500KB, but that is still a bit big. My concern is that if I included it with the others in the Theme Browser, someone on a dialup connection would get a pretty nasty surprise as they are clicking through the themes.

The solution we came up with is to keep Taft hosted on Denis’s server, and I’d link to it from here. He has set up a test blog so you can check it out - it’s great work.

Without further ado, I present Theme #140: Taft.

All of the theme updates that came in before the deadline have been posted. I’ll be sending information out to the judges later this evening.

Note to all theme authors: In order to be considered for the competition, any updates to your theme must have been submitted by the contest deadline. These are the updates I will be processing before the judges do their review.

I will still process updates that were sent in after the contest deadline, but probably not for a week or two.

I will be contacting you all to let you know when the themes are ready for judging.

I’ve posted 34 more themes that came in before last night’s deadline (including another from one of last year’s winners). There are still a few more themes that may be added as they received in time bit were sent back to the theme author for one reason or another.

I also have about 20-25 theme updates that need to be applied and posted before any judging can occur. Unfortunately, the updates are going to have to wait for another day - getting the new themes fixed and posted took about 6 hours today.

My sincere thanks to everyone who entered a theme and helped spread the word about the competition - 139 themes is more than I ever expected!

Matt e-mailed me today to let me know that he will be unavailable until April 4th and won’t be able to set up access to the repository for designers to check their themes in until he returns. However, he said I should:

let people know that if their theme isn’t physically in the repository yet for the prize I’m sponsoring that’s okay as long as they send the request email and they’re in the theme competition.

More information here.

I assume this means this particular prize will be announced when he gets back as well.

I’m been blown away by the number of themes submitted to the Theme Competition - frankly it’s a little difficult to view them all just using the theme switcher. Because of this, I’ve created a Theme Browser to make it easier to view and download the themes.

I’ve posted another 12 new themes, bringing the running total to a whopping 105 themes! Absolutely fantastic - in four weeks we have almost as many themes in this competition as I have styles that were submitted over the last year.

I’ve got about 25 updates to process already as well, but those won’t be done until after all the new themes that come in today are posted.

Just a reminder: you’ve got 24 hours to get your themes in. All themes must be received by 11:59PM PST March 25th, 2005 to be eligible for the lovely prizes.