As the promised land of canonical plugins draws near, when WordPress plugins maintained by development teams rather than single developers working solo will hopefully become the norm*, we thought it would be fun to encourage people to think about working in development teams with a friendly competition. There will be two: one for themes, one for plugins. Time is short, so if you’re interested, read fast and start coding!
The Rules:
Each submission must have 2 or more contributors. At least one of these contributors needs to be a New York Metro resident, and present at WordCamp NYC on Sunday, November 15.
Submissions must be repo-ready. That is, they should be able to be submitted to the WordPress.org theme or plugin repositories and be accepted: no spam, no security holes, no duping an existing theme or plugin.
Submissions must be new creations, not yet released to the public. You can use something you’ve been working on as a starting point, but remember that you *must* have collaborators to enter the competition.
Plugins can do pretty much anything, but must be GPL and must be free (as in beer), and not be simply a giveaway to upsell add-ons that are not free and/or GPL.
Ditto themes. You can do a basic theme, you can do a framework, you can do something specific and functional like P2, whatever, but it needs to be original to get into the top 3. Just changing a few colors or shifting the layout of an existing theme will not suffice for the sake of this competition. You may submit WordPress *or* BuddyPress themes.
The Deadline:
Submissions must be completed by 11:59pm (NYC time) on November 7, 2009. Leave a comment on this post and point to where the judges can download the code for evaluation. In your comment, feel free to provide the “elevator pitch” for your submission, describing what makes it special, etc. Identify in the comment who is on your team (link to names), who is in NYC, and who will be attending WordCamp NYC. This will give the judges enough time to evaluate entries. Late entries will not be accepted.
The Judging:
Matt Mullenweg and other trusted WordPress-universe personalities will be evaluating submissions for code competency, user experience, and style. The top 3 plugin submissions and the top 3 theme submissions will be invited to face off at WordCamp NYC’s Sunday session, which will be held in a 1000-person auditorium. That’s a lot of potential users, employers, clients, and collaborators.
Each team will have a few minutes to introduce their submissions, and then the judges will let you know what they liked and disliked about your entry, after which teams will have a chance to respond (think Project Runway for open source software). After all teams have been evaluated, the judges will announce a winning theme and a winning plugin. These winners will be congratulated (and their winning submissions promoted) on the official WordPress Development blog at http://wordpress.org/development, which reaches millions of people, once the submissions have been uploaded to the WordPress.org repositories.
Start your engines and get coding!
*If you don’t know why canonical plugins = promised land, you should probably attend WordCamp NYC to find out!
