A design contest for all you designers Options

[fixtatik]

Cleared this with the mods, so thank you mods! :)

As some of you know, I have an open-source management system. I've been working on the next version of it, and now it runs as a full site (or side site). You can display photography, backgrounds, layouts, whatever your heart desires, and it has plugins and a theme switcher (like WordPress).

I'd like to release it soon, but I've been too busy working on its inner workings and other projects to make a "default" theme for it that I can package with the download.

That's where you guys come in :D

I've decided to run a contest until November 13th at 11:59:59.99 pm, open to everyone older than 13 who has a PayPal account (and such a thing is legal in your country). What I'm looking for is someone to design a theme to package with what I call FMS.

For prizes:

- The winner gets up to $70. I started it at $20, and I'm adding on an extra $1 for every person who joins. After posting on another forum, it's up to $30 right now. If you win, you also get a permanent link back to your site (if you want, and if you have one) from within the theme--which means you'll be opening your doors to new visitors from all around.

- Two runners up will receive $10

In regards to the theme itself:

This is for FMS, but you don't need to worry about any specific coding. Basically, just design a site, one that would have a gallery of both images and templates. You can use placeholders to show how everything is organized. I'd like it to be unique (try to stray from a typical 3-column Myspace layout site), as FMS goes beyond Myspace--there will be plugins to showcase WordPress themes, regular HTML templates, and more. There's also a blog plugin, so you could design an area for a blog (bonus points! :D). Above all, it needs to be lightweight and cleanly coded. Alone, FMS is under 200KB unzipped--I'd like to keep the total download under 400KB, images included.

If you're interested, please reply to this thread or PM me your name (doesn't need to be your full name, just something to let the world know who designed such a masterpiece) and your website (if you have one, for including in the theme). Please PM me your submissions rather than posting any screenshots in the thread, to save you the problem of anyone stealing your ideas.

Any questions at all, feel free to PM me, or email me: hello[at]fixtatik.com. I'll announce the winners on Sunday the 15th.

[fixtatik]

Slipped my mind that many people don't know what it is. Sorry :s

FMS is an open source management system that I've been working on since June 08. Started as a very simple script to display Myspace layouts, but it's grown to a full-site CMS, with a bit of familiarity to WordPress. Now it supports Myspace 1.0/2.0 and image galleries, and it has support for plugins, so people can add additional showcase items, like WordPress themes, HTML templates, other social networks, whatever. There's a list of features here: http://fixtatik.com/projects/fms

You can upload different themes (and apply them from within the admin panel, like in WordPress), so the contest is creating a theme (layout, template, whatever you wanna call it) for a site that runs on FMS. In designing it, you don't really need to worry about coding it to work with FMS, because that just requires a couple copy & pastes.

It's basically a conjuncture of three pages:
- What the user sees when they're looking at layouts
- What the user sees when they're looking at images and graphics galleries
- What the user sees when they're on the home page or any custom page

As more of a perk, you can also do a custom 404 page, customize how the search results page looks, design a blog for it (for the blog plugin).

You can list categories in drop-down menus, on the sidebar, or not at all. It's really entirely up to you how you choose to design it. In a nutshell, it's an extremely lightweight version of CreateBlog that you can use on your own site.