Idea for a theme contest

[movix]

Hi community,

First sorry for my bad english. i hope it will be clear.

At my first visit on the DF site i was a bit demotivated upon the presentation of the DF site it self and also about the themes listed for download.
A few weeks later i came back without remembering my first visit. I was looking for other aspects than design of CMS's and got convinced. From there i used DF for all sites i built.

As i allready read on these forums, people see a lack in themes available for DF. Most themes are quite similar to the default theme, only some exceptions offer hudge reDesign of the basic themes.

I wonder if it could boost the popularity of DF if they were more allover redesigned themes available. More users = bigger community = more contributions
I don't know if this is wished by the developers and the community leaders. But if so, here my thought about a way to perhaps get it done.

Take the donation addon to collect donation dedicated as a reward for the best designs, everybody can follow up the jackpot.
Define a period for theme submissions and donations (can also be a jackpot amount to be reached to close the period). Define a survey period during wich the community will vote the themes registered in contest. define winners (3 best, classify category and the winner is the first of each catégory). Take the donated money to buy Amazon GiftCode to give the rewards.
One constest rule should be to make the themes available for the community.

Thank you for the great work that is done in DragonFly, it makes my life a lot easier in the passed years and if this contribution seems interesting to you, i would be the first to make a donation to honor the work of the best themes designers out there.

PS: i did not found any better place to post this, move it if it's the wrong place.

[radiogetswild]

What we need is some one to be able to port artisteer themes into DF as they already written in php and you can make a new theme in just one click with this program and the themes are web20 style... its this that makes other cms sites with so many themes.....

www.artisteer.com/

cheers Tim

[movix]

I forgot to mention that the themes must be checked for compatibility with the DF core, and that compatibility issues with the core should exclude themes from being approved for the contest.

I guess that there are a lot of other subjects that need to be defined, so brainstorming is open...

[layingback]

@movix: Great idea. I hope you are planning on putting in the time to manage this? Had you considered limiting the themes to reDesign2/3 based ones? reDesign3 has to be the way of the future for themes. This would also solve your concern about compatibility. Plus facilitate a future upgrade to DF10. [ It would be a shame to generate new themes that have to be 'left behind' with DF9. As it doesn't really move us forward from where we are today. ]

@radiogetswild: Why do you want a basic pick-and-tweak template system when you have reDesign? It's really no harder to use reDesign to build your own theme - and you are limited only by your own imagination.

True you have to learn CSS, but you aren't likely to get very far with either approach unless you do learn it to some level. [ And Eestlane's specific.css trick means you don't even have to edit his reDesign3 code, you build your own theme in its own CSS layer, so updates are easy to deploy. ]

Just Look at greenday2k.net to see what is possible.

[movix]

Of course i would be happy to spend some time in helping to manage this.

I agree that efforts should be done for the coming version.
But there is no reason that themes must be based on reDesign. I do not understand why reDesign based themes would automaticaly be compatible.
When tableless CSS theming is a concern for the future, it should be defined a compatibility rule.

[BrokenCrust]

I would build a theme and make it public but it would not be based on re-design, nor would it include templates for any non core module (and then not even coppermine).

I would have thought the minimum requirement is to have themes that aren't based on anything else much and that are cross browser compatible.

[movix]

I know that theming coppermine is not a trivial job but as it is part of the core i think it should be part of the theme.
Are there plans to modify coppermine to fit more into the templating system of DF 10 ?

Cross browser compatibility is of course a concern and thus a requierement for accepted themes.

Also i agree that accepted themes should be build from scratch or at least based on the basic theme.

I'll start a new post as soon as there are more comments like this in order to list all requierements and define possible contest rules.

[BrokenCrust]

Fair enough. It's your competition so make the rules as you like, but keep in mind that coders aren't plentiful and if you make the rules to difficult the number of entries you have may be thin indeed.

Unless DF10 goes to RC1 I don't think that it should be considered the core - 9.2.1 is the current release and that's what I'd expect to theme.

Ideally, I'd like the see the winners theme on this site. It needs an upgrade and I think that way it gives us incentive to be really good.

[movix]

i also thought about proposing to make the winners theme the default theme for this site, but as i guess there are a lot of specific pages it would not be fair to expect theme designers to intagrate this point in their work.

For sure it would be great if the admins of this site take the winners theme and add all specificics to use it properly.

If i understood it right, the admin section will stay in a default theme. How to consider this point in rules definition ?

[BrokenCrust]

It doesn't in my 9.2.1 installs, it uses whatever theme is selected (i.e. the admin section is also themed). This is what it should do I believe unless you have an unsupported CVS version of 9 or 10. It might be as well to check if 9.3 will be along soon and theme for that.

[movix]

Not more people ?
Bump

[BrokenCrust]

I think everyone voted already

[movix]

hmmm, i thought the community was more active than that, i'm surprised!

[Dylert]

I found this thread now, and it seems very interesting! Only 9 people have voted and Movix wonders if this is the whole community. I hope it's not....but with a great theme, a fresher look, DF would have been much more used and the community had been much bigger. I don't want to be too negative, but this is a MUST for Dragonfly CMS!

[movix]

Thanks, for this post Dylert.
Indeed i start having wories about the situation around DF.

i've recently seen a post from a module dev announcing that he stops working on his mods for DF.

I know that the core team is still working on evolution of DF and it makes me less worry i could be.

I often say "The product you know very well is always better than the other". I only know DF as a CMS very well, and it's not because of that that i'll try to give it a chance more to stay alive. With my basic knowledge of web developpement i'm convinced of DF because of it's perfomance and security.

Long words short, i'm willed to spend the first 100$ for the winner of this contest if the core team would give this idea a chance and perhaps even make it visible on the DF home page.