Theme Contest Planning

Premise

The visual elements of the current site are fairly bland. As we are not artistically talented ourselves, we figure it would be beneficial to hold a contest to:

  • Get more/better themes
  • Get more people involved

Rules

  • contest duration: 1 month
  • backend functionality must not be changed
  • no limit on the number of submissions
  • judges are not allowed to participate
  • no 3rd party copyright material
  • submission must be compatible with the pre-specified version
  • all submitted material will be provided for download and redistribution under the TE license
  • copyright is held by the original author
  • themes must work in IE, Firefox, Safari and Opera
  • original themes?

Judging

  • DSU?
  • Judges pick top 3
  • top 3 overall win prizes

Prizes

  • PowerBook?
  • iPod
  • web hosting (liability?)
  • cash? (1000, 500, 300)
  • books (O'Reilly? Apress?)
    • Ruby, Web development/design
  • Sun?
  • Software? (Komodo?)
  • T-shirts?
  • Certificates/Honerable mention in credits.

Technical Stuff

  • one-click installer/executeable provides easy way of getting a running version of TE
  • allow external directory to contain themes (specify via web interface)
  • Themes Framework
  • instructions on how initialize a new theme and short instructions on how to modify it

What Needs To Be Done

  • Rules
  • Prizes
    • Funding For Said Prizes

Examples

Type Theme Contest

Google Summer Of Code