For all you WordPress theme designers out there, there’s a cool new competition going on right now (until the end of July), with a bit of a twist.
The Sandbox Designs Competition is a WordPress design competition based around the excellent Sandbox theme. The theme is very well structured and thought out, and (perhaps to illustrate that) the competition is CSS + images only, no PHP modifications (ala Zen Garden). PS - there’s prize money involved!
After looking at Sandbox, I really like it, and plan to use it as my default theme, or perhaps base it around some of the highlights from the competition. The WordPress developers are currently thinking about including it as one of the “out of the box” themes you get when you first download WP (in case you didn’t take my word for it being cool).
I won’t be entering in the competition, because I’m not much of a graphic designer, but the great thing about a competition like this is it really provides a huge benefit to the community. I really love the idea of not allowing PHP modifications as well; keep the structure consistent, and they will be SO much easier to support (from the perspective of theme/design modders and plugin authors).
2 Comments
Oh, you should totally enter your Sandbox design into the competition. Just think that you can enter it, then use it for your site. If you’re in to that sort of thing.
Also, you’re dead-on about the benefits of this type of comp. While a whole-theme comp is also good, it’s also different.
And for plugin authors, the Sandbox offers so many scripting opportunities with those semantic class-generating functions. Just boggles the mind.
Thanks for the write up!
Cool; I look forward to seeing the progress on this.
The more I look into Sandbox, the more I like it. The attention to microformats is yet another reason to love this theme.
I remember Matt mentioning (on the dev list) the potential inclusion of Sandbox in the default WP distro, which I would love.
I believe he said it probably wouldn’t be the default, but it sure would be great if this competition got the kind of momentum to maybe change that too.