The SandPress Theme Won 1ST Place, So What’s Next?

Update I Wrote this in a hurry, Corrected some Typos and added list of other winners

When I logged in to my computer this morning, I had completely forgotten that today at 5:30 AM (Indian Time) the results for the SandBox Design Competition would be announced. I opened FireFox and my Gmail Manager Extension showed that I had received more than 25-30 mails and Comments.

I found out that The SandPress Theme won the First Place in the SandBox WordPress Design Competition. It took a while for it to sink in. I want to thank the judges and everyone for the support and kind words. There are a few people I would like to thank specially, while I might not have the time to comment and take part in discussion in forums (WordPress.Com, sndbx.org), these are the kind of people who make the WordPress community such a great help and resource, without such people WordPress would be just another obscure Blogging Platform.

• Scott for running the SandBox Competition in the most professional and transparent way, providing all possible help and support.
• Adam the CSS Genius for giving me the idea for implementing the Date Stamp using Images.
• Engtech for providing the SandBox HTML Dummy code it was a great help.
• People in the SandBox Forums and the WordPress.com forums, again it was Scott, Adam, Engtech and a few dedicated WordPress Community members like DrMike, timethief, thatgirlagain, atthe404 sorry if I missed out anyone.

I have tried my best to personally thank everyone who had some encouragement and kind words for my me.

A List of other Winners and participants. Copied from scott’s blog. The numbers indicate the total points. you can also look at the complete data score here

1. Moo-Point by Will Wilkins 23 Second place
2. Prima Sunaryo Hadi 19 Third place
3. Essay Ian Stewart 15 Runner-up
4. Tiffany Blue Ia Lucero 10 Runner-up
5. Shades of Gray Leslie Franke 10 Runner-up
6. Diurnal Carolyn Smith 9
7. Milkia Christian Betancourt 8
8. Oriole Jason Porritt 8
9. MIX Jauhari Nurudin 6
10. Blueberry Dean< Robinson 5
11. Walk in the Shadows Adam Freetly 4
12. Scrappr Gordon Brander 4
13. Hourglass Daniela Risse 4
14. Sakeena Shazia Mistry 3
15. Oranges Chris V. 3
16. The Blue Butterfly Carolyn Smith 2
17. Takimata Robert Ellis 2
18. Picnic Carolyn Smith 1
19. Chocolate Vanilla Stephen James Broughton 1

So what happens next with The SandPress WordPress Theme?

I will continue to support the SandPress Theme. Here is a mini Road Map

Current Goals

• Bug Fixes
• Side Bar Content and Widgets Needs more styling for various widgets.
• For the Date Stamp on 31st the Image doesn’t show up.
• Remove The SandPress Header or show people how to do it.
• Content Formatting Bugs example Bold or the strong tag doen’t show up properly

Future Goals

• Move The SandPress Code to Google Code.
• Get Feeback from the community for new Features.
• Launch a forum for support and discussions.
• Launch SandPress.com
• SandPress Candies (Different Colour Schemes)
• Comment Box needs to be made flexible i.e. it expands if there are more fields.
• Support for Popular plugins while remaining backward compatible with SandPress.

A few things I am debating.

• While three columns are great some people prefer 2 columns with a 780px width. I am thinking of making a two column version too, with a large footer.
• I don’t like the semantic structure that SandBox is following .i.e. h1 for blog name and h3 in the side bar. I prefer to follow what Chris Pearson has outlined. But this means I need to break away from the SandBox.

So the competion may be over but I am not done yet with SandPress, in the end it has a lot of hidden potential its just waiting to be discovered