WordCamp New York City 2009

We’re shocked. Really, we thought people would be crawling out of the woodwork to have Matt Mullenweg, Mark Jaquith and Brian Gardner review their plugin and theme submissions. We thought people would be trying really hard to be in the top three to get a chance to present their work onstage in front of the entire WordCamp NYC audience. And we really thought people would enter b/c the winners will be announced on the WordPress.org development blog, which gets millions of views.

But there was only 1 theme submission and a couple of plugins. Come on, where’s your competitive spirit?

In the interest of making the theme/plugin judging portion of the Sunday program more interesting, we’re extending the deadline for submissions to November 11. You have three more days to finish a theme or plugin per the contest rules.

Have the mad coding skills, but no ideas? Fine, here are a few ideas you are free to borrow:
Theme Ideas

• Travelogue theme. Use custom fields for things like where you stayed, who you met, where you ate, photo galleries, etc.
• Resume theme. Create a nice resume theme that fits an overview on one page and links to different templates for personal profile, educational experience, specific job descriptions, portfolio.
• BuddyPress theme for a regular membership-based group site. Make it look like a regular web site, not like a social network, while still making it clear that the members of the group can use use these features to communicate with each other. Examples: a church site with blogs for various interest groups, a company employee site, an alumni network, a neighborhood site, a babysitting club.
• Videoblog theme. Display one video per day with author intro post and video transcript, with separate directory section to browse all videos by date, title, tag, category, etc.
• Gallery theme. Work some magic for displaying groups of photos or images.

Plugin Ideas

• Update the QuickPress module on dashboard to be configurable so user can choose which elements to include (title, post, tag, category, media files, sticky post status, etc.)
• Change the way the results are displayed when searching for plugins from the admin, so that the name of the plugin does not link to an external site, but instead brings in the information about that plugin from the repo.
• Create a customizable twitter widget that can display @name and #topic updates mingled in one thread.
• Anything you can think of around comments, stats, etc.

Okay, so, creative juices flowing? If we don’t get at least 3 eligible entries for themes and 3 for plugins, we’ll pick the top 2 themes and top 2 plugins for judging instead.

Get cracking, only 3 days left to enter!