Enter Kirk. Kirk is exactly the person who I want downloading my themes. After downloading and playing with one of my themes (blog.txt to be specific), Kirk e-mails me requesting some support for some specific but discreet task. I help. I’m happy to.

Kirk files tickets on my theme project pages for things that are broken or could be enhanced. Some I accept, some I don’t. He takes both well. I hear from him now and again. A happy user.

Here’s what separates Kirk from most users. Kirk e-mails me wanting to know how to disable the generator link. For security, he says. Regardless of whether or not I think this improves the security of his blog, I help. I describe the problem and set him off in the right direction.

For this, I make him a simple plugin he can upload based directly on what Peter Westwood documented on his blog. Easy as pie. Took me ten minutes. I slap it into a PHP file and send it along to Kirk knowing he’ll take it from there.

But what Kirk does is, instead of being satisfied after his problem was solved, he shares his experience and provides the solution for others.

Community. Here, here.

Though I administered all aspects of the competition, I went to great efforts to make sure I didn’t influence the judges, pressure the sponsors, or direct the participants. While I believe this competition was a success, I hope to have the chance in the future to apply what I learned. And I’ll be writing about some of those things shortly.

Anyhow, I did want to post my own choice cuts from the competition. My choices below should not be interpreted as who I think should have won or how I think the judges should have voted. Nope. The judges did a fine job and, in their place, perhaps my choices below would be different.

So here are just some guy’s take on the designs. These are the designs I have time to sit down and highlight my appreciation for.

1. Diurnal

   

   Carolyn’s expert use of the date-based classes in the Sandbox makes this design shift with the cycles of the day. A clean design with a subtle but engaging feature. Not to mention this design has built-in support for the other layouts packaged with the Sandbox. My personal favorite.

2. Takimata

   

   I think Robert submitted the most daring design in to the competition. Which is great. But the best part is how lovely this design is. It’s details, use of color, layout, everything. It’s exactly what I would love to see more of in blog design: thorough innovation. Excellent.

3. Promised Land

   

   Adam’s design exhibits a mastery of graphic design, layout, and attention to detail. Promised Land is a design people should pay for. And pay a lot for. The completeness of this style sheet should be used as the example for WordPress theme developers. Period.

4. Moo-Point

   

   Will’s design tastes are also just after my own. I love most everything about this design, but especially I love his post layout. I think it’s really clean and open. I also think Will did excellent at integrating certain, choice Sandbox classes. The details are subtle but enhance the design. Thumbs up.

5. Essay

   

   After my own heart, Ian’s clean, open design does everything it should. The majority of designers who aim to produce minimalist designs usually muddle things up in the details, Essay doesn’t. The header graphic is an excellent flare, well done. Pretty much this is what I enjoy stumbling upon on the Web.

6. Veracity

   

   I see a tremendous amount of potential in this Weiran Zhang’s design. While not perfect, this design inspires me. When I see it, I think about ways to build on what’s already been accomplished. I expect to see many, many derivatives of this design for exactly that reason. And that’s a hell of an achievement.

7. Shades of Gray

   

   Leslie submitted this clean design and I love that it is shades of gray. Some uses of color in this design are a bit strong, a bit dramatic, I immediately know when looking at it that it is a thoughtful, thorough design. Like the second sidebar below the content area. Yes!

8. Hourglass

   

   Anyone interested in developing for the Sandbox or wanting to understand what can be done with the Sandbox should look at Daniela’s design, which utilities a great number of the Sandbox dynamic classes. While not my color scheme nor my favorite, it can be pointed to a quintessential Sandbox design.

Honestly, I have other favorites too, like Picnic, Sakeena, CITYscape, and Blueberry, just to mention a few.

So which are your favorites? And why?

This was just a few days after the release of Sandbox v0.9, but I think you’ll be surprised to see how much thought and work has gone into making this the best possible competition. Which leads me to introduce to you . . .

Sandbox Designs Competition

The SDC is located at sndbx.org. It’s going to be a great competition. The WordPress community has produced some amazing work. I have every confidence that we’ll be seeing more of that.

Anyhow, all the competition details (and more) are available on sndbx.org and I encourage everyone to get started: sketch, mockup, wireframe, whatever you do. Two months is enough time to produce at least one great design.

You can do it for the glory, you can do it for the cash, or you can do it just to see if you win or not. But remember: this is a design competition. We have a leveled playing field. We have so many CSS tools and techniques available.

Even though the Sandbox comes with some style sheets (Kubrick, Spartan) as examples, I thought I’d provide one with at least some core classes so that novices might have an idea of where to begin; however, I emphatically point out that, unlike most themes, the Sandbox produces a great number of classes within the markup dynamically.

Which means that the index page is going to have some different classes than a single post page. A “page” is going have a few different classes than a category archive, search results different from a 404. And so on.

Note. To reference the dynamic classes available, please see the Sandbox readme.html.

Now let’s go!

There are a few I’d like for more WordPress theme developers to consider standardizing across the board.

First of all, they are classes, so they shouldn’t semantically impact the content. This is important because if, in the future, some person shockingly decides to change themes, the content of their posts isn’t affected.

Image classes

First of these class would be image positioning classes: .alignleft, .alignright, and .center. Since the positioning and/or float of images should be determined by CSS in XHTML, I think these are probably the safest special classes to agree upon.

img.alignleft {
   float: left;
   margin: 0.5em 1em 0.5em 0;
}

img.alignright {
   float: right;
   margin: 0.5em 0 0.5em 1em;
}

img.center {
   display: block;
   margin: 0.5em auto;
   text-align: center;
}

I deleted the img element prefix from the descriptors above because I agree with Adam’s comment below. Still not sure about what to do about content columns.

An all-caps class

Another that I noticed first in Kubrick and have since seen all over the place is span.caps. I’m not sure why this came about, but I find it useful enough. It’s purely presentational.

span.caps {
   font-variant: small-caps;
}

This could also be text-transform:uppercase; with essentially the same use. A per theme choice, I suppose.

XFN relationship classes

I’m also adding XFN link classes to my theme revisions. Why? Because I’m fascinated with Microformats, frankly. I found these great microformat icons, notably the XFN relationship icons.

Now, there is a more technically accurate way to style links with XFN relationship attributes, as noted on the XFN intro page:

a[rel~="friend"]{
   background: url('xfn-friend.png') no-repeat center right;
   margin-right: 2px;
   padding: 2px 26px 2px 0;
}

But this, of course, requires the browser to be whooly CSS 2.1 compliant, i.e., handle CSS attribute selectors. And can we guess which browser doesn’t do this? (If you guessed IE, then you already knew the answer.)

Using attribute selectors in CSS can cause IE do all sorts of strange things, like ignore any inline selectors and following descriptors. Which means that not only will CSS not display an icon (as is set above) but might also screw up following CSS selectors. It’s touchy.

So this is my compromise. Which is fine, and forward-compatible:

a.xfn-friend {
   background: url('xfn-friend.png') no-repeat center right;
   margin-right: 2px;
   padding: 2px 26px 2px 0;
}

The downfall of this is that it would be undermined if the link had the class but not the rel="friend" attribute. Which would be deception by icon.

Anyhow, those are just the most minor of things I’ve been considering and I’d like to hear what others had to say on the subject.

Check Thomas’ blog for news on the competition. Get your themes ready now.

This competition will differ from prior competitions in that (1) no currently released themes will be accepted, (2) no mods of themes will be accepted, and (3) we all know that site rips like Azul, Plain Jane, etc., will not be accepted.

Theme releases lately, all seem to be small changes on already released themes. People are releasing “flavors” of their favourite themes, with a link back to their site in the credits. This is not only a bit shady, but also very boring.

The amount of really new themes being added to the pool, seems to be shrinking every day as people rehash old ideas. Those rehashed themes lacking the same creativity and originality of the original theme creator. Are designers feeling paralyzed by something, making them hold back their ideas?

His challenge, as you can read, is to basically come up with something innovative and interesting. By Friday, June 30. I read this on Sunday and thought I would produce something. I felt up to it, regardless of not being recognized by the theme competition as well as by David, who has never linked to any of my themes on BloggingPro.com.

I began working on a theme on Monday and continued with it today. It was going to be a departure for me: a strong, dark color scheme (i.e., not another background: #FFF; theme). I had some solid ideas to work with and it was going to be another additional to my minimalist theme catalogue.

With but two days left to put a theme together, though, I realize that I’m not going to finish what I’m working on. There’s just not enough time with all my job and freelance projects.

The fact is I’m an amateur: at coding, at design, et al. But I think my work is a respectable contribution to the WordPress community, though I’ve no illusions about making a mark.

And there are many, many other amateurs out there much more knowledgeable and talented than I am.

Challenge is actually a question

Unintentionally, I assume, David is suggesting that the WordPress community isn’t what it used to be. Or at least the collective sum of creativity therein isn’t.

But blogs have changed a lot (obviously) and so has WordPress. What first began as a blogging platform has been creeping towards becoming a CMS, and I think that this is a good thing. Blogs gave everyone the ability to publish on the Web. Accesbility to CMS-like features just increases this appeal.

Essentially the WordPress community—as well as others—has become a melting pot. The demographic of WordPress users 18 months ago is probably (and this is an assumption) entirely different than what it is now. The Web continues to change as me and my fellow know-nothings get our hands on it.

This is going to continue to change drastically as the people who got their feet wet with MySpace (like a billion users or some nonsense) dive into using WordPress.

Another digression

As a newcomer myself—and a fringe-member at best—I’d like to put forth a few of my own questions for both the great, silent Wordpress-user majority and the entrenched players.

Is this slowdown caused by a broadening of the community? Has the percentage of crap themes vs. genius themes increased or decreased with respect to the total? Why am I so clueless?

I don’t know. I have no idea. For now, though, I eagerly await the results. The gauntlet has been thrown down.