A couple days back, Weblog Tools Collection announced the start of the WordPress Plugin Competition 2009. For the third straight year, the folks over at Weblog Tools Collection is organizing a competition that aims to generate interest in WordPress and also the development of new plugins that can help WordPress users and contribute to the WordPress community.
Contest Rules and Important Details:
- All code must be GPL compatible
- All Plugins must be compatible with WordPress 2.7 and above
- All Plugins have to be secure and use secure coding methods. This is very important.
- Plugins must be made available through the WordPress Extend pages
- Plugins must be officially submitted through email and announced and discussed on the Plugin Competition Blog. More details on submissions will be added in the last month of the competition. Release of plugin after competition start does not mean submission. You can submit your plugin way after its release to work out bugs etc.
- Running time for competition = 3 months starting the 1st of May till the 31st of July
- True WordPress plugins only. No manual modifications can be required of users. No editing of core files allowed.
- You cannot submit plugins that have been released already. Modification or re-use of existing code to achieve completely new functionality allowed.
- All plugins require documentation as in the WordPress Extend pages.
- Preliminary support for the plugin has to be provided to the public.
- Any and all prizes/controversies/issues will be judged and decided at my sole discretion.
- Past winners are not eligible for this competition.
Prizes from last year’s competition:
- Weblog Tools Collection $1000 (p)
- Automattic $1000
- Matt Mullenweg $1000
- James and Andrew from Incsub have offered up $250 for a plugin that is WPMU compatible. They add that WPMU plugins are not that dissimilar to regular plugins, but need to run automatically and efficiently via wp-content/mu-plugins and require users to make no hard code changes (just edits in Settings) and for global administration to be possible via the Site Admin menu.
- Geof F. Morris $100
- WindowsObserver.com Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas for the PC and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
- OIOPublisher Four copies of their advertising plugin
- billyboylindien.com has donated $50 towards prizes (p)
- Blogalized has donated a 12 month blogclub subscription from our site worth $49.95
- John Yunker has donated a copy of “Country Codes of the World” poster to the plugin contest winner (value: $30)
- Clickfire.com has dontated $50 towards the competition prizes (p)
- Kym Huynh is a songwriter and is writing a song about WordPress (just for fun I have been told) and has offered to write a song and record it professionally in a studio for the winner of the WordPress Plugin Compeitition (worth $400-$500)
- IndieLab has donated $50 towards the competition (p)
- Joshua has donated $200 towards the competition (p)
- iWeb has donated a dedicated server for one year (Intel Core 2 Duo, HD 160GB Sata2, 1GB of RAM and 1500GB of bandwidth per month)
The 2009 WordPress Plugin Competition will last for 3 months, starting on May 1st until July 31st. Other additional notes include: Developers can only submit plugins that have been written/created for this competition and have not been previously released to the public before the start of this competition.
For those of you who have the skills to develop WordPress plugins, why don’t you give it a try and join the competition? Who knows, your idea/plugin might be the next winner or one of the finalists. Or if you’d like to help, you can also donate some money to the competition prizes.
Anyone planning to join the Weblog Tools Collection WordPress Plugin Competition 2009? Please share your thoughts by leaving a comment below.
wow, wordpress is kickin’ it, thanks for sharing.
and, another wow jayps! they are really breaking the bank vaults for this contest. it only shows first, how popular WP and second, how so serious WP on improving its platform for all the users.
@jan – Yes, the prizes are really impressive. Aside from that, the winning plugin will make the developer popular and will drive lots of traffic to his blog or the plugin page.
Regarding the article you mentioned, that’s very interesting and true. I was also thinking about that recently and I have some plans that are related to that. Bloggers can’t have all their eggs in one basket and having different streams of income may it be active or passive will benefit the blogger more.
Can this be learned outside the classroom? Definitely! I know of several successful web designers/developers who learned everything about web design and stuff from online tutorials, self-study and experimentation. Its all a matter of will and perseverance.
In your case, I believe that you have great potential to be a successful copywriter, a freelance writer/blogger or a blogger for a certain network. ;)
Wow, this is serious money, Jaypee. Impressive.
I've read somewhere a very interesting article. This one tackles the matter of earning serious money online. One of them is of course blog monetization through ads and affiliate marketing. Is that it's called? Well, the alternative presented is for one to learn some useful skills like this one you write about. Or it can be online related.
The point is that we all invest an awful chunk of time blogging with only modest income to show for it. The author goes on push the idea to learn other forms of income. Something not dependent on the arbitrariness of Google and web search traffic results. And it is these skills. These knowledge and skills can't be taken away from us. We only have to be industrious.
What do you think, Jaypee. Can this be learned outside of the classroom. Can this be learned through online tutorials? That's a great alternative, right?
I'm thinking of the fine example set by Gem here. Am I too far afield on this one?