Site design contest results announced - PHP Classes blog

By Manuel Lemos
manuellemos.net
<email contact>

Contents

* Contest results

* Second turn

* Upcoming site developments


* Contest results

The design contest voting period ended on December 31. Right after that, the results were announced in the design proposals page.

http://www.phpclasses.org/design/

Since there were 34 contestants, the votes were very split very sparsely. This means that many designs raised the interest of different users. Congratulations to all contestants!


* Second turn

Since no contestant got at least 50% of the votes, a second turn will follow just with the two most voted designs:

1. InterGraphicDESIGNS_01 by InterGraphicDESIGNS from Costa Rica with 20.98% of the votes
http://www.phpclasses.org/design/theme/igd01.html

2. Cool Sky by Guilherme Heyse Ribas from Brazil with 17.62% of the votes
http://www.phpclasses.org/design/theme/coolsky.html

From now on and until January 15, these contestants will be allowed to retouch their designs, eventually to improve aspects based on the feedback they got from the users that commented on their proposals.

The second turn voting period will start January 16 and will last until January 31. On February 1 the final winner will be announced.


* Upcoming site developments

The development of the site design contest system was intense. A lot of code was written since it was started in August 2008.

All this effort was not done just to run one edition of the contest. As it was mentioned before, this edition only allowed to propose a new design for the default header and footer of all the site pages, as well some CSS styles and icons that are also used in the bodies of many page types.

Later I expect to start another edition of this design contest that will allow designers to propose also different designs for the bodies of the most common types of pages.

I will just not announce now when the next edition happens because I still need to evaluate the reactions of the users to the new design that is still not decided. Only after that I need to reflect on how and when the following edition of the contest will take place.

Other than that, the design proposal system required the development several programming components that will be used to implement new or improved features of the site.

For instance, the HTML template editor will be used to let authors submit more interesting blog posts. Currently, the blog posting system uses a text based format that does not allow to properly format articles.

There are already several guest articles waiting on the queue to be published once this editor enabled in the blog system.

The poll system that was developed for the contest will also be used for instance to let authors enquire users to ask them about features that they would like to see implemented in their classes.

Other site features that are not related with the design system will also be implemented now that I will have more time to spend on new developments.

I have been working on some of those features, some which are almost ready to be announced.

If you want to know more about the upcoming features even before they are announced here, you may want to follow the PHPClassesEarly account on Twitter.

http://twitter.com/phpclassesearly

That is a Twitter account that was created precisely to satisfy the curiosity of all of you early adopters that want to know about the upcoming features sooner rather than later.

If you have a particular suggestion on a site feature that you like to see implemented, feel free to post a comment to this article.