So Monsieur Alex King has begun his second annual WordPress Theme design competition. Interesting. Now I remember a few people got really annoyed with the last one of these, and while I really am with Alex on the reason behind the competition I can see where the apprehension can come from.

Will I be entering the competition? Highly unlikely. There is several reasons for this:

1. The first being that I've got loads of other projects on my plate that take much higher preference.
2. The second and in my opinion much more important is the fact that a good template takes a hell of a lot of time and effort. I mean that. It can take months of proper preparation and hours of testing, for all the bugs and kinks to be ironed out. What you think Manji was the way it is the first time it came out? No it wasn't. That's why we're on version 1.1, and gearing up to version 1.11 (hopefully I'll have some cool news to report on this very soon).

The point I’m trying to make is a template competition can be a good thing, but the judges will have to be able to discard the themes have got some obvious fundamental flaws. Some people might take short cuts, and might not really care about what the CSS looks like or is structured. It took me something like a week to get the structure of the Manji CSS correct and cleaned up in the way it’s presented. I had the luxury of time on my hand. Will the people entering this competition have the same luxury?

Oh don’t get me wrong I don’t claim Manji is perfect for a second, but I think anyone who’s contacted me with regards to a problem I’ve tried to solve it for them straight away, even though I’m not a coder, and generally speaking they’ve not been serious.

Which brings the next point up, what happens to the forums when people start asking questions left right and centre? Are the creators of the themes going to offer support or are they going to be lumped on the poor support forums? When Manji came out I had a forum that killed my site for a day and a half. Sorry that’s not happening again. Until I find a forum system I can trust and update easily I’m not putting another Manji forum up.

So good luck to all those entering the competition, I hope it’s a success, but if you’re thinking about entering be prepared for a lot of work ahead, unless you’re a coding guru ^_^.