ThemesWiki.org is a new website designed to provide users with comprehensive, free guides for designing Web Themes and Templates. This site intends to ease the web design process by providing tutorials for a large number of systems at a common location.

It is often difficult to find a resource that is focused on providing quality, relevant and free information for designing themes and templates; specifically one that covers a wide range of applications. This is where ThemesWiki.org intends to step in. Launched initially with tutorials covering over 20 Content Management Systems, ThemesWiki.org is expected to grow into an exhaustive resource for the theming community, with users generating most of the content.

“ThemesWiki.org promises to fill a much needed gap in the theming and templating community” said Ric Shreves, author of the Packt book, Drupal 5 Themes. “It is a source of information that cuts across systems and provides designers and developers a place to share ideas and approaches outside of the walled gardens of individual project sites.” Shreves, a partner in Water & Stone, an open source web development company, went on to say that “Mambo, Joomla, Drupal, Plone, Modx — whatever — none of the clients really care and frankly it matters less and less as time goes by. What we should be concerned with is the end result, and that is where this site comes in."

ThemesWiki.org is part of an ongoing process at Packt to develop unique methods of contributing to the Open Source community. Notable other initiatives include the website on free installation tutorials, www.InstallationWiki.org, and the annual Open Source CMS Award that has a total prize package of $20,000 to be divided among several winning projects.

ThemesWiki.org has been developed using the open source MediaWiki software package and has initially been populated using chapters from Packt books. ThemesWiki.org is free to use and open for everyone to contribute to. It is expected to grow and expand over the coming months with more tutorials added by users.

For more information, please visit www.ThemesWiki.org