CMSMS | CMS Made Simple

Time has come to finally announce the winner of the design competition! First we wish to thank all who submitted their designs and made it a tough call for us to decide.

Let’s hear some drum rolls… as we announce the winner… Steve Sicherman!

Steve – who is from Saskatoon, Canada – is currently working together with the Development Team with the markup for his design. It may take awhile before the site is dressed in its new clothes, as we also will do some restructuring in the process.

For the curious of you, have a preview of the homepage and an example of the sub pages.

We are very happy with Steve’s design and think this will give a fresh, new look to the website of CMS Made Simple.

For this, Steve will be sent some CMSMS swag as I learnt the Americans call it, that is some stuff with the CMSMS logo on it. For more info about Steve Sicherman and his work, please visit his website at stevesicherman.com. There are some great examples of other designs he has made there too.

Steve Sicherman writes this about himself:

I’ve been designing web sites since ‘95, and working for companies building enterprise-level Content Management Systems for about 6 years. My experience in the industry is what drew me to CMS Made Simple, I was very surprised to find an open source CMS application that was doing so many things right. While there are a number of powerful Open Source CMS’s out there, CMSMS is the only one I’m comfortable handing over to clients with very little experience updating web content.

Again, our thanks to Steve and to everyone who submitted their designs! Sorry to those who would have liked to take part to, but weren’t able to because of time constraints… There is a redesign of the themes site in the making, so we look forward to some great designs being posted there.

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Yesterday we were to announce the winner in the design competition. We have received several excellent design entries, that we are very grateful for! However, we have asked for a few more examples with slight changes before making the final announcement of the winner within a couple of days.

We thank you for your patience and look forward as much as you all to see the site dressed in the new design!

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In light of recent articles, and in the interest of updating its main sites, CMSMS is holding a design competition for re-designing cmsmadesimple.org.

If you’re a talented designer and think you’ve got what it takes to take the CMSMS domains to the next level, then keep reading.

CMSMS needs you!

We can’t offer much in the way of incentive or prizes – this is an open source project, remember?! – but we can promise you kudos and praise beyond your wildest dreams. Plus the sure knowledge that your name will be up in lights across all the CMSMS domains in perpetuity, or at least until we need another re-design. Maybe we’ll even give you a free t-shirt…

Here are the guidelines:

• Edit: What we’re after is a great design for cmsmadesimple.org. So although a full XHTML/CSS markup would be preferred you can just as well submit a Photoshop image. We are aware that the timeline is tight, so if you have a great design, don’t let any details below scare you!
• Your design should preferably be provided as a CMSMS Theme. That is, export templates and stylesheets with the module called Theme Manager (can be installed through the Module Manager) to an xml file.
• You may also provide a Photoshop layered image, although that makes it more difficult to win…
• If you include images with a theme, link them to the uploads/images/<themename> folder in the stylesheets and pack the theme xml file and the image(s) in a zip or tar file.
• Themes should be valid XHTML 1.0 transitional and CSS 2.1 (minimum). That means no hacks, or as few as humanly possible, and same appearance in all major browsers.
• No Flash or other propritary technologies – avoid Java and JavaScripts to the greatest extent possible.
  • blink tag is banned
  • gif animations are just as bad as flash
• We would like to see a Web 2.0, clean and accessible layout.
• We would like you to use CMSMMS tags in the templates. These include but are not limited to {sitename}, {title}, {breadcrumbs}, {search}, {content}, {footer} etc.
• You may include content example pages in the zip file.
• The general navigation structure should be similar to the current site structure, but flexible enough to be able to adjust.
• Everything included in the theme must be the designer’s original work. No copyrighted images or template theft!

Timeline:

• Send all themes to competition@cmsmadesimple.org at the last by October 10 2007.
• include your contact details in the email and in a README.txt file in the zip package
• A jury from the core team will select which theme will be used for cmsmadesimple.org. The winner will be announced on October 15.
• Themes that are submitted as proper packages will be presented on the themes site (http://themes.cmsmadesimple.org) after the winner has been announced

Disclaimer:
CMS Made Simple claims the right to edit the winning design to fit with the site structure.

Well?! What are you waiting for? Get designing.

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