In the 12 days since the contest ended, we tested every single plugin & theme that was submitted on the 5 qualities we listed out on our Launch page. I think we can easily say this contest was a win for the GetSimple project and it’s community. A lot of publicity and great files came about because of it.

Without further ado, the winners are… (drum roll please…)

GRAND PRIZE: Simplico Theme

The Simplico theme by Makk (Maciej Kopala) is a wonderfully setup theme that includes plenty of additional page templates, great documentation and plugin support for two of the most widely use plugins, all behind a really great looking theme.

This theme had it all and we truly feel it should become the gold standard of how themes should be developed for GetSimple in the future. Documentation + Customization + Plugin Support = Grand Prize worthy.

SECOND PLACE: Simple Backups

The Simple Backups plugin by ReedMurphy took a task that everyone should be doing and made it work without needing to schedule a cron job (unless of course you wanted to). His way of getting around that limitation was ingenious and is something that I will be implementing on some of my own sites in the very near future.

THIRD PLACE: Simple Newsletter

The Simple Newsletter plugin by dshaner (David Shaner) is an extremely useful plugin for those of you who want to add a simple newsletter script to your site. It handles confirmed emails, and does it all without making the installer jump through hoops to get it installed. While this plugin could stand to use a little bit more documentation, its eventual ease and usefulness put it into our top 3.

Everybody Else – Thank you

Everyone who took the time to submit a file to the Create-a-thon really helped the community grow regardless of who won. There were many many files that deserved to be in the top 3, but unfortunately we could only choose 3. Congratulations to all of the GS Create-a-thon winners!

Sponsors!

Also, and this goes with all the risk of sounding like a broken record, this great contest wouldn’t have been possible without the help and generousity of our great list of sponsors. Each and every one of them contributed something to the pot, and for that we are very, very grateful. Please check them out as a thank you!

• (mt) MediaTemple - Graciously donated 3 years of free (gs) hosting plus a box of  (mt) schwag!
• BuySellAds - Donated $100 worth of credit
• AuthorityLabs - Donated a lifetime Basic Account
• Carsonified’s Treehouse - Donated one month free of their Gold tutorial service for the top 3 winners!
• Hello Bar - Donated a copy of their javascript notification bar
• FormStack - Donated a free Starter account for a year
• FormAssembly - Donated a free lifetime Basic account
• KISSmetrics - Donated a free year of their Bootstrap account
• BlueCotton – Helped us get our t-shirts ordered

It is April 1st, which means the GetSimple The Create-a-thon submission window is now closed. In the coming week or so I will be reviewing each theme and plugin and determining the top 3 winners.

There were a lot of great submissions, and I think before even testing any of the files, I can declare this contest a success. In the month of March, we had a total of 47 new files (30 themes & 17 plugins) added to our repository, which is an amazing increase over any of the prior months.

Here is the list of valid plugins and themes that will be vying for a piece of the $1,800 in prizes we secured for the contest.

Themes

• Coa – Coa is a theme framework to create a clean and functional template.
• Skeleton Theme – A theme based on the Skeleton framework, responsive & mobile ready
• Dark Moon – Dark Moon is a simple theme build on the html5boilerplate
• Africa – An ideal theme for some one looking for a tours and travel website
• NW Format – NW Format theme focuses on quicker page loads
• Adsense Ready Blog – Its Adsense ready… enjoy
• Elegant Responsive – Simple & minimal theme and it’s completely responsive and mobile ready.
• WhatHappened – A simple 2-column theme with integrated Facebook and Twitter share buttons
• Maroon – This is a theme created for a personal website
• Simplico – Simplico is a simple and clean template with additional design pages
• myApp theme – A simple 2 column theme with some ilustration images in right column
• Flamingo – Flamingo is a bright and responsive theme
• InnovationOutline – Updated Innovation theme that allows for better use of HTML5 for outlining
• GSPixia – Theme with automatic slide and possibility of 4 blocks in the footer.
• FoliSimple – A simple and clean portfolio type theme with a fixed top menu bar.
• Simple Mobile – Simple theme using jquery mobile
• myCompany theme – This theme is HTML5/CSS3 responsive
• BlueBusiness – One of the first business like theme for GetSimple, HTML5 ready
• Metro Theme – Originally inspired by Windows 8′s metro design

Plugins

• Last tweet(s) – Show one or two last tweets in the sidebar of your site.
• Font Resizer – Allows a website visitor to increase/decrease the font size of the page
• Plugin Reorder – Allows admin to reorder plugins so that content is loaded in the order wanted
• Simple Newsletter Plugin – A plugin that allows emailing of any page as a newsletter.
• Pinterest (All Templates) – Allow the “pinning” of articles.
• BSG Admin Header Background – For those who use GetSimple on multiple installations
• Simple Backups – Automated, schedulable remote and local backups for your GetSimple websites
• Updater – Keep your GetSimple installation and plugins up to date.
• FancyBoxPlugin – This little Plugin enables FancyBox on the frontend
• Pajax – Pajax loads content through ajax.
• Simple Chat – A simple chat program that displays on a page
• SA Development Suite – Development plugin to assist developers
• Page Plugins – This is a plugin that allows the admin to turn on/off plugins at the page level.

Contest Sponsors

This goes without saying, but we couldn’t have had this contest without the wonderful and gracious contributions of our Create-a-thon sponsors. Please check their services out, they all have a great service and deserve to be considered next time you are searching for a product they offer. Thanks!

• (mt) MediaTemple - Graciously donated 3 years of free (gs) hosting plus a box of  (mt) schwag!
• BuySellAds - Donated $100 worth of credit
• AuthorityLabs - Donated a lifetime Basic Account
• Carsonified’s Treehouse - Donated one month free of their Gold tutorial service for the top 3 winners!
• Hello Bar - Donated a copy of their javascript notification bar
• FormStack - Donated a free Starter account for a year
• FormAssembly - Donated a free lifetime Basic account
• KISSmetrics - Donated a free year of their Bootstrap account
• BlueCotton – Helped us get our t-shirts ordered

GetSimple has always had to deal with complaints that there were not enough good free themes available (and to a lesser extent, plugins). It’s been a problem because GetSimple simply does not have the market awareness yet to attract the type of quality files that WordPress and the other larger CMS’s do.

The March 2012 Create-a-thon contest was created as a bold attempt to change this.

Tweet #gscreateathon

Sponsors:

• (mt) MediaTemple - Graciously donated 3 years of free (gs) hosting plus a box of  (mt) schwag!
• BuySellAds - Donated $100 worth of credit
• AuthorityLabs - Donated a lifetime Basic Account
• Carsonified’s Treehouse - Donated one month free of their Gold tutorial service for the top 3 winners!
• Hello Bar - Donated a copy of their javascript notification bar
• FormStack - Donated a free Starter account for a year
• FormAssembly - Donated a free lifetime Basic account
• KISSmetrics - Donated a free year of their Bootstrap account
• BlueCotton – Helped us get our t-shirts ordered

Take a look at our official March 2012 Create-a-thon page for rules and prizes.

• Automatic sitemap generation
• A drag-and-drop menu manager
• Ability to “clone” a page
• Update notifications for both the core & plugins
• Ajax-ified delete/enable/disable functions
• Internal page caching
• Encoding Fixes
• Many smaller UI enhancements (CAPS detection, etc.)

We suggest that everyone upgrades to 3.1 as soon as possible. You can download the latest here, and get the upgrade instructions here.

By the Numbers

• 247: Commits in this release (r421 – r668)
• 117: Bugs squashed in this release
• 332: Days since 3.0 was released – 3/26/2011

Contributors

There have been many code/bug/idea contributors over the months since 3.0 was released. I have no way of finding everyone who has contributed code since then, but I would like to especially thank the current GS team for their tireless work in keeping the project on track and working. In addition to them, Joshas helped in updating CKEditor and Carlos helped immensely with the character encoding problems that have dogged us since inception. In addition, countless others also helped with other minor fixes along the way, and we owe this release to everyone’s hard work.

3.1 Improvements

We are proud of the improvements we’ve made in GetSimple 3.1 – Here is a quick list, but you can always view the full list on our change log.

• Automatic Sitemap generation
• A drag-and-drop menu manager
• Ability to “clone” a page
• Update notifications for both the core & plugins
• Ajax-ified delete/enable/disable functions
• Internal page caching
• Many smaller UI enhancements (CAPS detection, etc.)

A Call for Beta Testers

In order to get GetSimple 3.1 out the door, we need to find as many testers as we can. Please download the latest Beta zip file, then post any issues/bugs/concerns/comments/etc. in the Beta section of our forum.

If you are a developer of one of these items – PLEASE TEST!

SVN Access

Reminder: regardless of the beta version we’ve created for the “beta download”, you can always download the cutting edge version straight from our SVN. A wiki article on how to use our SVN is here.

Steps to Enter

1. Go to the the voting page on LinuxJournal.com
2. Enter your email address
3. Scroll down (or search) to question #34. Best Content Management System
4. Enter GetSimple CMS into the field “Other”
5. Submit

Thank you!

The site includes general information about GetSimple, instructions on how to install, migrate and upgrade the system plus know-how regarding plugins and themes. Furthermore, there’s tips and tricks and a press section as well.

Check them out on Twitter: @GetSimpleCMSDE

In Deutsch:

Einige Community-Mitglieder haben bereits eine Weile an einer deutschen Schwester-Website gearbeitet und wir sind stolz Euch www.get-simple.de präsentieren zu können!

Die Website beinhaltet allgemeine Informationen zu GetSimple, Anleitungen wie man es installiert, migriert und aktualisiert sowie Wissen in Bezug auf Plugins und Themes. Weiterhin gibt es Tipps und Tricks und einen Presse-Bereich.

Besucht sie auf  Twitter: @GetSimpleCMSDE

In Deutsch:

Die deutsche Übersetzung des Think Vitamin-Interviews mit Chris Cagle wurde auf www.get-simple.de veröffentlicht! Unter anderem spricht Chris darin darüber, was ihn zur Entwicklung von GetSimple inspiriert. Viel Spaß beim lesen!

Alan Johnson of Carsonified I talk how I started GetSimple, and what advice I would give to developers considering starting a new open source project. It is an honor to be featured on such a well-known site such as ThinkVitamin. A big “thank you” needs to go out to Alan for agreeing to put my ugly mug on their site!

The interview was fun to do, and made me really think about how the last few years dealing with GetSimple has gone. I am extremely proud of the community and what GS has become in such a short period of time – GetSimple turns 2 in August!