In these comments, the organization of a Drupal theme contest came up again. This idea has been discussed many times before. I promised to communicate more about what the Drupal Association is doing, so I can tell you that a theme contest has been discussed a few times already within the General Assembly.

Actually, as a Permanent Member, Earl Miles wrote a detailed proposal for such a contest. The Association was discussing some of the implementation details, but the project has been delayed a bit because more pressing issues, such as organizing DrupalCon Barcelona, researching a sound membership structure, and tackling the drupal.org infrastructure had to be addressed first.

So, I expect the theme contest idea to be discussed again in the near future.

It is generally recognized that theming, and more specifically the availability of both good-looking high quality themes and skilled theme developers remains one of Drupal's most important Achilles' heels, in spite of a lot of efforts to attract designers to the Drupal community, and to make Drupal theming easier. The Drupal forums are filled with "Drupal theme designer wanted" posts and with people complaining that there are really not that much ready-to-go themes available. Any theme-related change in Drupal core, such as the addition of Garland and the color picker has been cheerfully welcomed.

From my own experience of developing personal blogs and Drupal sites for rather small businesses, I can tell that a lot of non-tech people value the quality of their new website's design even higher than the functional power. Only when they are told the cost of hiring a specialized developer to create a brand new and unique Drupal theme for their business or organisation, a lot of "small" potential Drupal site owners get frustrated quickly and may start to look elsewhere. Some may argue that this kind of users is not the target audience of the Drupal project, but I disagree. I am sure that by dramatically increasing the number of relatively simple Drupal themes this group of Drupal users will grow exponentially.

Well, I was sure of that. Right now, I'm not so sure anymore since the facts contradict the theory. For example, about five months ago, Jeff Eaton announced his Gutenberg module. This module allows you to download Movable Type styles and install them as if they were genuine Drupal themes. There is a wealth of these styles available, such as the really nice ones of The Style Contest. Obviously, this isn't the ultimate solution, but if the demand for Drupal themes was so high, one would expect Drupal users to literally eat such a project alive. However, all of this didn't happen - as far as I can see at least. After testing the module, I must admit that there are some bugs, and that not all MT styles work right out of the box. But that wouldn't bother a convinced Open Source user. He or she would simply file issues in the patch queue to help squash those bugs. There are only six issues for the Gutenberg project in total.

Now why did this happen? Was this project not sufficiently promoted? Or is the demand for Drupal themes not that high after all? I would be really interested in another download statistics update to see how the theme-related modules are performing, because I'm a bit confused here...