Update: It now appears that the kcyap theme competition was a complete hoax and the site owner made off with 188 WordPress 2.0 specific themes! The site itself has disappeared, the owner doesn’t respond to any questions nor does he make any attempt to restore the posts, etc. You can read up on some of the discussion in the Wordpress Support Forums. I have removed the links to the hoax site so-as to not generate any additional traffic or inbound links for the jerk.

I ask that all theme designers who applied to the scam competition now enter the new, legit one — and also would be extremely grateful if you would submit your themes to me, as well. While I’ve nothing to offer in the way of prizes (wish I could, but hopefully some fame and the knowledge that you’re helping the community will be inspiration enough), I am extremely eager to create a Comprehensive List of WordPress 2.0 specific themes (and have plans to create a blog specifically about themes to make it much easier for folks to find the theme of their dreams). Please email all theme info to howtoblog @ gmail.com with a subject of WP 2.0 theme — thanks!

On March 5th, the WordPress 2.0 Theme Design Competition that was being hosted by kcyap.com claimed that it got hacked (and that his entire database was erased):

“Very regret to announced that this competition blog website had been hacked. I have no backup for all this data and not sure if the server admin did have a backup on it or not. I am very sorry for this incident.

The prizes will still be the same and i will upload once again all the submitted themes on by one from now. This may takes quite some time, please be patient.

The result for this competition will still be announce don the 10th March 2006.”

This should be a reminder to everyone to BACKUP YOUR DATABASE ON A REGULAR BASIS (I’ll write a how-to post on this shortly).

And as many commenters pointed out, it was unacceptable for a site hosting a theme competition of this level to not have backups. Other commenters suggested the site owner use the Google cache to try to retrieve the old posts.

However, the big question that’s on my mind - and which was brought up by CountZero is how did this happen??

“But the really more important task than assigning any guilt to anyone on this case, I suppose, is to find out how the hacker could compromise the machine. Did he use some undiscovered WordPress vulnerability, did he make use of those being published just about a week ago, or did he make use of other security issues on your server? Is it sure that these loophole(s) are closed now, and can you make sure there is no backdoor/rootkit left on the machine now?”

I hope the WordPress team is taking a good look at this to ensure that it wasn’t the result of some previously unknown security vulnerability in WordPress. Was the kycap Theme Competition Blog running on WP 2.0 or WP 2.0.1? And if he was running the latest version (WP 2.0.1), did the hackers get in through a WordPress security flaw, or through some other method related to his specific hosting situation? Or perhaps he had spyware on his PC and they had a keylogger which gave them access to his password so they could just easily log into his account. (Which reminds me that everyone should have Microsoft’s free Anti-Spyware software installed on their Window’s PCs)

Additionally, there has also been speculation that the whole Theme Competition was a hoax (to gain google pagerank?). Many commenters have found it rather suspicious that even if the database was wiped that there still wouldn’t be backups of all of the themes that designers had submitted - after all, they sent them in through email. And what of all the ‘unnamed judges’ (which I always thought was a little shady..) - shouldn’t they have copies of the themes and their descriptions, as well?

IMHO, the Theme Competition site owner (Justin) owes it to the WP community to work with both his webhost and the WordPress team to discover just how that site got hacked, and then reveal that information to everyone - both to restore his credibility and so that we can all know whether we need to be worried about the same thing happening to us - and learn from his situation about how to protect ourselves. Specifically, we need to know whether the hack stemmed from a problem with WordPress security. I’ll rest easier once this information is known, especially since I’m still entrenched in hoards of hours in porting How to Blog over to WP from TypePad (it was easy to import the posts, but there’s all this minutiae that’s taking hoards of hours to deal with as part of the transition).

Wow, I can’t believe it - I’ve just uploaded the latest update to my WP theme list and it now contains a mindblowing 615 free wordpress themes that wordpress users can download and use on their blogs for free.

Some of the themes have been tested on WordPress 2.0, and have been marked as such, and a few of the themes are actually specifically for WordPress 2.0 and won’t work with 1.5.x (also marked accordingly).

I’m super excited about the prospect of all the new themes to come down the pipeline now that WP 2.0 is out - and for all of the updates to current themes that theme authors might be lured into performing given the fabulous customization that wordpress 2 allows.

For those who don’t know, WordPress 2.0 has taken themes to the next level in a serious way, providing the ability for theme authors to actually allow theme users with options that can be easily customized through a panel in the adminstration area of WordPress. If a theme is customizable, there will be a tab under Presentation for “Current Theme Options”.

The Default theme that is packaged with WordPress 2.0 allows you to make changes to the theme’s header, including the font color and colors used for the background of the header.

But themes like Regulus 2.0 really take it up a knotch by providing checkboxes allowing the blog owner to change the header image, the color scheme, whether to show full posts or excerpts on the homepage, whether to display the post’s author on the homepage, as well as sidebar options such as ’show calendar’, ’show recent posts’, ’show all archive months’, etc.

You can also see a running demo of a new WP 2.0 theme called BloxPress which actually allows the blog viewer to change the layout of the theme, dragging and dropping theme sections around to change their order in the sidebar at will and adding and removing content as it suits them (something which I wish was incorporated into the WordPress core for the blog owners, at least). Seriously cool stuff.

It’s a beautiful thing, this level of customization. I sincerely hope that more WordPress 2.0 theme authors create their themes with these sort of theme options (and more!) in mind!

WordPress 2.0 also allows theme designers to include a screenshot as part of their theme package which will then display on the Presentation|Themes tab so it’s much easier to select a theme that’s suited to your blogging style.

I’m going to need a better way of managing my theme list now that some themes are for v1.5.x and others just for 2.0, etc which isn’t something I can easily due from within the constrains of TypePad. Which leads me to my next post: feeling like I’m stuck in limbo and with a conundrum on my hands.

Just found out that Ozh has created a WordPress Theme Toolkit which, upon editing three lines of code in any existing theme, will provide Theme Authors with an admin menu accessible through the WordPress Presentation UI. Very cool stuff - all would-be wordpress theme authors should check it out! Same goes for those of you dabbling in modifying existing themes. Nice work Ozh!

Boy, theme authors have been busy during the month-plus while I was sick!

I just spent the entire day working on updating my comprehensive wordpress theme list, and it’s now up to a whopping 463 wordpress themes!

When I first started the list, I never guessed it would grow to be so large! I thought we’d hit a huge milestone when we crossed the 200 mark. Now we’re at 463 and growing — way to go to the wordpress community and all the theme authors that so generously have shared their work with us!

Color me blown away!

Update: The theme list now contains 615+ WP themes and growing!

Just a note that my comprehensive list of free themes for WordPress 1.5 and up has been updated to add 13 new themes, and now consists of a whopping 369 themes! (update - make that 616 themes!)

As always, tremendous props to the many theme authors for all their hard work in creating these themes AND for their generousity in sharing them with the wordpress community. If you’re using someone’s theme, I’d bet they’d love to hear about it so shoot them an email and give them the thanks they deserve.

On a more frustrating note, I’ve discovered at least two people who have stolen my wordpress theme list and reprinted it on their websites without my permission, one of them even claiming it as his own work (with the audacity of reprinting word-for-word all of the accompanying verbiage that went with my post!) Fortunately, I’ve resolved the issue in both instances, but this prompted me to remind everyone that my blog posts (and yours!) are protected under copyright laws and may not be reprinted without permission.

Much thanks to Tony at tonystreet.com for notifying me about the guy who stole my post in it’s entirety and helping me to get him to remove it (and also for all the wonderful wordpress themes he has created and shared with us!)

To my loyal blog readers - if you come across a site which has stolen my theme list, please let me know by emailing me at howtoblog @ gmail.com (remove the spaces - protecting myself from spammers). I’ve spent well over 40 hours in the months since March 2005 on both creating and maintaining my comprehensive list of free wordpress themes.

Also, thanks to everyone for the kind words (and patience) while I’ve been ill. Migraines are a real nightmare to deal with, and prevented me from being online for quite some time. But I’ve been feeling better lately, and while I’ll need to attend to some work in order to be able to pay my mortgage, I look forward to getting back to work on How to Blog!! I’ve missed you guys!

Update: the theme list now contains 615+ themes and will soon have even more — a huge update is on the way!