I'm absolutely happy with them. _Serene_ is an absolutely fantastic template and absolutely deserved to win.

(Eww, I just used _absolutely_ three times within a single sentance.)

Oh and the rubric seems fine.

First off, I think textplates was a great and worthwhile exercise and really helps improve more widespread awareness of textpattern by offering more ways to start using it. For most potential textpattern users, having something to adapt is much easier than working from first principles.

It'd be great if one could see a breakdown of the weightings for the individual entries. Whilst I appreciate there is a danger that some entrants may not agree with certain weightings, if people are good sports and accept that the judges decision is final, then I think all stand to learn something from them, both entrants as well as users.

Being able to see the weightings would help entrants see where they could improve their templates, it would help those choosing templates decide how easy it will be to use for their project (over and above the personal preference and project suitability) and help future template makers make better templates by thinking about what makes a good template. It would also help assess the usefulness of the rubrics.

Rubrics: Design and novelty of layout are necessarily somewhat subjective, whilst other criteria such as browser support and code are pretty much objective. Ease of use and generic applicability lies somewhere in between as it requires knowledge of textpattern's possibilities as well vision for potential usage scenarios. This is both a question of design and technical skill. I think this could have more weighting in future.

p=. * * *

An example: Personally, I have not made a single blog but several corporate/non-profit or portfolio sites using textpattern. In my view the "Profilo":http://textplates.com/2006/02/26/profilo template provides an excellent and attractive starting point for that kind of site. Many potential users will be able to see their own site in it with their own header images, logo, sections, colours etc. and this would change it's appearance personality-wise too, i.e. it's not too specific either – that's good in my view (for this kind of application)

I tried it out the other day for a friend looking to set up a small non-profit site. Installation went fine, instructions were mostly very good and clear. But extensibility is not as good as it could be (I'm guessing this due in part to orangscale's preferred way of developing sites, certain limitations in textpattern's standard functions or the kind of section/articles that a template site starts out with so to be fair the decisions made are legitimate).

For instance, for the not so well-versed txp-admin it would be more extensible and applicable if:

* hard-coded text in the page templates was put in articles and accessed through txp:output_form in the template (but would require articles to be made for the template).
* Stylesheets were editable through txp (easily changed, choice probably a matter of personal prefence)
* The Navmenu would be built from txp's sections rather than hard-coded. One might lose the access keys but gain flexibility from the site maker's perspective (e.g. rdt_section_menu).
* Header images could be article or section images rather than stylesheet backgrounds so that txp's image functionality can be used instead of FTP. Alternatively if one doesn't want them to print, that at least the stylesheets are editable.

Perhaps over and above what the template provides, what would make it really useful is:

* the right-hand column was a section-article submenu (e.g. à la rdt_article_menu)
* the article form included a gallery if that article had a gallery (e.g. rss_thumbpop)

Obviously there's a cut-off point as to what a template should provide and what is individual development on top. Again, it also depends upon the kind of user one is targetting, the txp-beginner, the experienced txp'ler, the eventual site owner or the site end-user. Getting back to my first sentence, my thinking is that the whole templates concept is targetted mostly at the txp-beginner or as good starting points for more experienced txp'ler.

Jakob