I think it’s fair to say I completely underestimated the response I would get to the WordPress 1.5 Theme Competition.
Last year’s Styles Competition produced 39 submissions – which really seemed like a lot at the time because there were few if any before then. I thought doubling the number of last year’s entries would be pretty awesome – but I’d have been happy with 70… turns out we doubled that!
Having such a huge response was a bit of a double edged sword – what my old boss would call a success disaster
A “theme” is much more complex than a “style”. A style is just a .CSS file – the worst it can do is not display the page’s content properly. A theme is a collection of .PHP files, .CSS files, .JS files and images in various formats. The code in a theme is much more powerful, but also much more dangerous. I decided that, as part of the service of hosting the Theme Competition, I also needed do the following:
- Check each theme to make sure it didn’t include malicous code (say code to publish your database password – I was happy to see that none did this).
- Check each theme to make sure it didn’t call plugins that weren’t included and activated by the theme itself.
- Check each theme for missing images/CSS references/broken PHP includes.
- Check each theme to make sure the way images were referenced would be portable (using
<?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>
, etc.). - Check each theme to make sure that code that was commented out in a way that wouldn’t add to script execution time.
- Check each theme to make sure conditional code (like adding in the Theme Switcher) was done properly – often I’d have to change this so that the word ‘Themes’ wouldn’t appear on its own when the list of themes wasn’t present.
While I’m sure I missed things here and there, I’d guess I fixed about 3-5 things per theme. All of this took quite a bit of time, compounded by the fact that I’d have to do it again when a theme was updated.
Several people have asked why I didn’t just reject themes that didn’t meet these requirements and/or ask the theme author to fix them and resubmit. The short answer is that I wanted more than 20 themes in the competition. I did try this in a few cases, but I found that the theme authors needed guidance via e-mail on how to fix the problems and it was taking even more time.
The great response also necessitated the creation of the Theme Browser to enable people to better browse through all the themes – a nice problem to have to solve.
Not only did I underestimate the overall number of submissions the competition would receive (2x), I also underestimated how much time I’d need to spend processing each submission (3x)1. The end result was a competition that took about 6x more time for me to run than I expected – something that was both annoying and quite satisfying. 😎
Now I can sit back and wait to tally up the scores from all the theme competition judges.
- Estimating the time spend on each theme at 15 minutes (which is conservative), I spent 35 hours just processing themes. Add a few hours for the initial set-up of the blog, posting the rules, creating the theme browser, e-mailing the judges, tallying up their reponses, posting the results, notifying and sending prizes to the winners, etc. – I’d like those that suggested the theme competition be extended, or run every month, to keep this all in mind. 😉 [back]
Thanks for all the hard work Alex! If you repeat the contest, I would imagine sponsors would be happy to dedicate a percentage of prizes to cover administrative costs (i.e. your time.) Weblogs.us would certainly be up for that.
Along those lines of compensation, do you have an Amazon wishlist or anything similar?
Alex, I really appreciate your work on this. My users loved the style repository, and they’ll probably love the themes repository even more.
Frankly, I’m surprised that you didn’t take time to use Tasks to track the time you spent on each theme … 😉
That’s a good idea JD – that might make it feasible to run again next year. I wanted to do something to help the WordPress community and just got a little more than I bargained for. I do have wishlists, etc. here.
I’m with JD. This is, of course, in lieu of the beer I’d buy you if I were in the area. 😉
Must of taken you really long, eh? About 10 minutes per theme probaly. Or even more.
Read the footnote. 🙂
I remember going to the old contest page to get different themes for 1.2 and when I started to work on my own theme I realized I had to submit it to the new contest. And just from having all these different themes here it’s been a blessing in seeing how other people solve the problem of displaying content, etc.
So many thanks again Alex and maybe next year someone can code up a DB with a way that people can auto-upload submissions.
I could have very easily automated the entire process, but then (as noted above) most of the themes would have been broken in one way or another.
Congratulation Alex on the smashing sucess of the competition 🙂
Theme Browser seems currently broken:
“Error establishing a database connection
This either means that the username and password information in your wp-config.php file is incorrect or we can’t contact the database server at localhost.”
(9:20pm CST, Monday the 28th)
It should come back up on its own… that server seems to be a little up and down today (I moved the sample blog used in the theme browser to another server to help balance the ridiculous amount of traffic I’ve been getting these past few days).
EDIT: It’s back up now.
Thanks for all the hard work Alex! My blog is down right now, but once it comes back up I’ll be using a theme that I wouldn’t have been made if it wasn’t for your contest. 🙂
Alex, thanks for your great work. I have used WP from the very beginning and love it even more: all the themes put beautiness to the poetry.
I will suggest you and WP run WP Theme competition every year in March.
Cheers
Mads
Thanks for the competition. All of the themes came in mighty handy last night when I accidentally overwrote my main theme files while trying to upload them to my ‘test bed’ install of WP.
And of course, I didn’t have backups.
Thanks for doing this! Coding a theme from scratch is very hard – and it makes a world of difference to know that there is a collection of quality themes that one can draw from to adapt for your own blog. I find I spend days tweaking a theme just to get it to look right on my site. I’ve already implemented two of the themes from the contest on two different sites. In both cases I had to do a lot of work just to make sure the sidebar appeared properly on “single” pages rather than the main index page. I say this just to highlight how complex this all is – if you hadn’t done the initial vetting, I probably would have ended up spending twice as long to figure out what was wrong!!!
One note: It would make a huge difference if there was some easy way to browse themes by thumbnails of screenshots rather than by title. It would be easier to find a theme you might have seen in the past but forgot about. I tend not to remember the names.
Thanks again.
I answered your previous request for thumbnails here.
I also want to thank you for the well executed competition, very professional like always Alex.
Oh and my bandwidth thanks you too; I have counted about 30 different referrals sporting my little theme in the space of a few days.
Cheers.
I think the theme “Yarr! Tis Me Blog!” wins the “Best name for a theme” award.
Most original theme – Meadow. The comment naming system needs to be implemented into Kubrick ASAP!
“21 udders squeezed” cracks me up.
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[…] (in most part) are professional, distinct and oh my gawd they are easy to install. I came acrossAlex King’s Theme Competition first, and made use of the Theme Browser which has a great collection of varied and unique themes. […]