WordPress Needs an Integrated Design Gallery
I have a proposal, a rough one, that I would like to share with the WordPress community in the hopes that it will do the following:
- solve the on-going debate about the default WordPress template
- help grow a development and design community around WordPress
- act as a revenue source to bring some much deserved funding to the WordPress project
WordPress, a very capable content publishing system, is very ugly when it’s first installed and it seems no one can stop talking about their unhappiness with the default design. Some kind individuals have stepped up to the plate in both word and deed by talking about a new default template as well as offering up templates of their own for others to use. Individual templates offered through an array of sites are not the answer however. A WordPress Design Gallery service is.
WordPress Design Gallery
Let’s start with the goal (the user-experience) and then talk about it’s implementation and additional benefits.
The End-User Experience
Within the WordPress Admin, you would click on ‘Templates’ and would be shown your currently chosen design or the default one if this is a fresh install. Further down would be a catalogue, fed to you from the WordPress site, of designs that you could choose from. You can browse the designs by popularity, at random, by design author, by design-type (i.e. minimalist, colorful, photoblogger), by design ratings, by the date added, or by the number of people using the design. There are a lot of ways one could find a design to call their own, but that should give you an idea. In the end, you choose the one you want, the css and associated images, provided there are any, get copied up to your installation, and you have a new design. Obviously, the implementation of this is not that simple, but the user experience needs to be in order to become a successful feature.
The Implementation
The Wordpress Design Gallery would allow anyone to submit their css and associated files as a design in the catalogue. Anyone? Yes, anyone. How do we help users find the better designs? We have a rating system. Users can rate individual designs, let’s say on a 1 to 4 star scale. We can also display the number of users currently using a particular design on their site and between the two we should be able to rank both the reputation of the design as well as the reputation of each individual designer in a way that helps end-users find designs that are not only functional, but aesthetically pleasing. Natural community behavior will bring quality designs to the top and encourage those who contribute pleasing designs to keep coming back for more. Hopefully, it will give newer designers, who are learning the ins and outs of online design, motivation to keeping practicing until they have something the community responds to.
Additional Benefits
A feature like the Design Gallery would take additional funds to run, but it’s a feature that can be self-sustaining and even, perhaps, become a real revenue source for the entire WordPress project. How? When a designer submits a design to the Gallery, they can choose to offer it in the gallery under one of a few scenarios.
- Completely free and under the GPL. Anyone can use it at no cost.
- For a fee. The designer adds a fee to the design. It could be as cheap as $0.10 US or as expensive as $5.00 US (perhaps more.) The designer and Wordpress split the profits at, let’s say, 50/50.
- For a fee where the author yields all the profits to WordPress
- Donation-ware. A voluntary fee is placed on the design. Users don’t have to pay, but they are asked to. The profits are either split or go completely to the Wordpress Project depending on what the author desides.
Every transaction here helps the evolution of WordPress. Wordpress gains new GPLed designs under the first agreement and gains another design as well as some revenue under the latter scenarios. Under any scenario, it’s growth: growth of the design community, growth of the software in general, and growth of a revenue base to keep this project alive.
The worldwide cellphone ringtone market for cellphones last year was 3.5 billion dollars US last year. Go back and read that again. The more you think about it, the crazier it seems. That’s an incredible number of people spending an incredible amount of money one dollar at a time for a tiny piece of music coming out of a sad speaker. If blogging is going to go mainstream, isn’t there a similar market for site designs? Won’t users change their designs every once in a while to refresh their site’s look? Isn’t there a similar market for WordPress designs where users will help fund the WordPress project one dollar at a time?
What We Need to Get Started
- A consensus as to whether or not this idea is valid
- A healthy index.php we can build css plus images designs around. We shouldn’t have to change the default index.php file to get the designs we want. (In theory.)
- A php based catalog system to manage designs, user and template reputations, and payment scenarios
I know it may seem like a lot to ask for, especially the last item, but a very simple implementation could be rolled out in a very short amount of time. We can make a dream list of features, but it’s smarter to make a short list of essentials, release something functional, learn by watching how people use it as well as what they ask for, and build from there.
That’s the idea in the rough. Let me know what you think, what makes sense, what doesn’t, and anything else you’d like to add.
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Great idea, and it could be further developed by allowing authors to provide mock-up photoshop files, etc. like the Kubrick template. Multiple headers or color schemes. But aside from the fact that you’ll need to get enough designers, developing quality templates, based on a specific registered index.php, you’ll still need to manage the project (who approves the designs) and develop the subsystems. Ewww.
I don’t think anyone needs to approve any designs. Any design can be submitted and the community will self police them by rating them.
As for getting designers on board, I really think this is a “if you build it, they will come” scenario. Look how many people already are throwing their effort into it.
The risk with self-policing is that you end up with something like Blogskins, full of teenagers ripping table-based designs off each other and violating copyright all over the place. Hosting is cheap enough and Wordpress easy enough to install that you can’t exclude that possibility.
If, however, you make everyone use the same basic index page you ensure xhtml validity and the project becomes a version of the Alex King Style Gallery (hopefully with a more flexible index.php allowing for genuine three-column layouts). I would be willing to contribute to that, but I honestly can’t see users being willing to pay for it.
Perhaps the solution is that the css you submit must validate, but self-policing does work. There can be a ton of bad designs and they can stay in the system. The important part is that the system is able to tell, through user ratings and the designers reputation, what designs are worth displaying for use.
I kinda like the idea.
Due to so many hacks/changes being done to the index.php files (by plug ins, alterations, etc), it should be left alone and only the CSS file be played with/swapped.
I also think the templates should be free/GPLd. Inserting the payment/fee parts into adds unwelcome complexity, and even expense (for Wordpress also - accounting, taxes, and reporting would have to be handled). Unforced/voluntary Donation-Ware might be nice.
I like the idea a lot. In fact, there’s something like this that’s already in place for the phpBB community. Check out this site and the way the bar remains at the top. Choose a style, and it is applied to a mirror of their own forum. (It can be slow, at times, due to volume.) Wordpress should have a default install up and running, with a few Lorum Ipsum articles up, and a similar style chooser.
You could argue that the long-term health and size of the community relies on something like this becoming available.
I think it’s an excellent idea. And it’s a great way to get some exposure for oneself as well.
Some sort of regulation will defenitely be needed. Think of the security problems alone you would get if you don’t. I’m assuming MSIE here, which has the expression-scripting possibility in css, and iirc mozilla has something similar. It’s quite easy to make a site use a background image which has the cookie as parameter. Now what happens? You choose the stylesheet from the admin interface somewhere, and then the stylesheet changes. At that point the image with the cookie parameter gets requested, and the evil stylesheet creator can access your blog using the cookie.
Another thing is that you’d probably want images to go along with the stylesheet, so purely a stylesheet won’t do i’d say.
Furthermore you probably want to be able to fill in a few parameters per stylesheet (like a logo). Just some thought. In general a good idea though, but i really think reviewing before adding is needed.
Interesting idea….
Obvious Diversion - WordPress Needs an Integrated Design Gallery WordPress, a very capable content publishing system, is very ugly when…
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Filed under: WP Pros WP Cons GeekBlogging — Jim S @ 3:33 pm
Obvious Diversion - WordPress Needs an Integrated Design Gallery WordPress, a very capable content pu [...]
Hi, just surfed in. I enjoyed looking around your web site. This site has been very useful to me so far and I have barely scrathed the surface of it.
Yes.. It is driving me crazt that there is no standard gallery.. i can’t find anyone to help me set one up