Here are the final site rules, and design submission rules and guidelines. As this site is a community site, rules might be changed by popular request.

Site Rules

The Open Design Community - OpenDesigns.org
Community rules

1. While debate and discussion is fine, we will not tolerate rudeness, insulting posts, personal attacks or purposeless inflammatory posts. Members should post in a way that is respectful of other users. Flaming or abusing users in any way will not be tolerated.

2. Members should remember this board is aimed at a general audience. Posting pornographic or generally offensive text, images, links, etc. is not allowed. This includes nudity, graphic language and profanity. As a rule, don't post anything you wouldn't want your grandmother (or grandchild) to read.

3. Advocacy of illegal activities such as software and music piracy and other intellectual property violations are not allowed.

4. While self promotion is allowed, excessive repeat posts of the same nature will be considered spam and shall not be tolerated. Promotion or services and sites that are not web design related, personal sites or projects of the posting member will also be considered spam. The definition of spam will be left to the decision of the site staff, if you are not sure, please ask first.

5. While these rules cover most common situations, they cannot anticipate everything. Consequently we reserve the right to take any actions we deem appropriate to ensure these forums are not disrupted or abused in any way.

Treat others how you wish to be treated yourself. Show respect to others and you will be respected.

Design submission rules and guidelines

Rules
A design that won't conform with these rules will not be approved.

1. Designs must be valid XHTML
2. No table-based layouts, tables should be used for tabular data only.
3. Text cannot be contained within images.
4. Buttons (e.g. W3C) are not allowed in designs.
5. All images must be your own and not copyrighted.
6. No JavaScript / DHTML is to be used in your design.

Guidelines

1. Try keeping your XHTML semantic and logically ordered.
2. A CSS layout alone isn't a template, please put some time and effort into the styling of the design.
3. Keep all images optimized for the web. Please keep the total file size under 200 kb. Normally 50 kb is more than enough.

Uploading Designs

Place all of the required design files into a folder with your design name and create a zip archive of that folder. Please do not use any special characters such as !, &, ? or spaces. Use underscores instead of spaces when naming the folder.

Edited by Christopher to include ' & Design Submission Guidelines' in the title of the post.

Fixed. thanks.

Can I use images that are part of the public domain for my templates?

You can use any images as long as you have the rights to use them and distribute them under the license you use on OD. That obviously means that public domain is 100% fine

padding bottom looks fine, I think you mean margin-bottom.

I am only joking here!

The original post by Lobsterman reminded me of the great novel by George Orwell entitled "Animal Farm", esp. where you see 'edited' and if you know the book,

These are great rules! Is there going to be a static page, or maybe even better make the current rules appear before designers/posters actually verify their account?

@Dieter: I think we are waiting a couple days now between approvals. I'll check with the other admins and find out.

@Dieter: I actually approved it shortly after your message. Check your profile page

@drago: we do have a help/FAQ page which is always being added to... the link is in the footer along with the site map link.

Of course a detailed page would be great and behind the scenes we are compiling all of this stuff. If we waited to have all of these things done before the site went live, it wouldn't ever get up... hehe... this site is bleeding edge... we do almost everything in a live working environment and on the fly.

Thanks for the suggestions and continued support of the site and community.

JS is only allowed in templates if you are hacking IE into functioning like a standards-compliant browser.

The reason it is not promoted is that while JS can add extra functionality to a website, it is not necessary for a standalone template. Unlike CSS and XHTML, there is no way to ensure that any JS included in a design is well-formed. Also, many popular libraries are quite large, which could bloat file-sizes for templates beyond what is reasonable. In addition, JS is not known by some users (I just don't want to learn), which might prevent them from using any template containing it.

That is the general consensus for submitted templates, although JS is still very popular in websites. Open Designs uses no fewer than 10 to run all this goodness. JS is not a bad thing, but it doesn't belong in templates, unless you have a good rebuttal.

Christopher: You are probably right.

Okay. I don't know where I got that idea from.

Andreas, we don't want text in images. If you see on the site where it says it's ok, let me know so I can remove that.

I do recall something about if people provided image source files, there might be an exception but again, I don't completely remember.

http://www.opendesigns.org/preview/?template=405
http://www.opendesigns.org/preview/?template=182
http://www.opendesigns.org/preview/?template=193
All use images containing text. I'm sure that there are others.

@yugnats: you didn't quote the beginning of that rule that states:

While self promotion is allowed, excessive repeat posts of the same nature will be considered spam and shall not be tolerated.

So as long as it's not excessive repeat posts, it's cool.

the way i read the rule right now it seems these things are not allowed:

- excessive repeat posts of the same nature
- promotion or services and sites that are not web design related
- personal sites or projects of the posting member

so maybe we should clarify it further?

Posted By: yugnatspersonal sites or projects of the posting member will also be considered spam.

I don't exactly get that part...
Omit it?

always willing to give my input.

Maybe allow each member to have ONE thread (discussion) in the "Self Promotion" category to show whatever they wish, within reason, of course. No offensive/questionable sites. This will give them a chance to show other member's their current projects, show off...etc.

I'm very interested in seeing what others are working on.

Now a little self promotion within other threads is tolerable. If someone asks for help and you have something that can help them, I don't think it hurts to post it. Obviously...attackr.com gets a lot of play around here. But if it's constant self promotion, it can be considered spam. If a person is constantly promoting themselves they can always contact the "member-in-need" via the e-mail form and leave a note in thread for the "m-i-n" to check their e-mail.

It makes complete sense to me...

4.While self promotion is allowed, excessive repeat posts of the same nature will be considered spam and shall not be tolerated. Promotion or services and sites that are not web design related, personal sites or projects of the posting member will also be considered spam. The definition of spam will be left to the decision of the site staff, if you are not sure, please ask first.

So... lets break it down step by step (and no, i'm not being sarcastic lol)

i. Self promotion is allowed, but, excessive repeat posts of the same nature isn't allowed.

ii. Promotion, services and sites that are not web design related / are not personal sites / are not projects of the posting member, is also spam.

iii. Overal decision of what is spam and what is not spam is the choice of the site staff.

iv. unsure? ask first!

I'm pretty sure it makes sense, but hey, it obviously didn't to others!

ii. Promotion, services and sites that are not web design related / are not personal sites / are not projects of the posting member, is also spam.

thats clearer adding the 'are not' in there. i'm assuming the forward slash means 'or'?

RULE 7 FOR MODS: Do not edit posts for small grammatical errors.

Who ever is doing this(you know who you are) please stop it or i think your mod status should be removed.

Hey Karan, if you're logged in you have a section up at the top which is similar to this:

Welcome Back Christopher! · Logout · Admin
If you click the Admin link you'll be presented with some more options in your Dashboard including links on the second level navigation in the top half of the page.

The two main links you'll want to use are Submit a Design which allows you to fill out the form and submit your design for approval. If it meets the design submission rules and guidelines which are outlined within the first post of this thread, then you can expect your design to be approved within three to seven days, if it fails to meet one, or many, of the rules and guidelines it will be rejected from the queue and you shall receive a brief email explaining why it was rejected so you know what to do before resubmitting it.

The other link you'll no doubt notice, is labelled My Designs which allows you to see all of the designs of which you have submitted. It also provides quick links to enable you to edit the design if you need to, if you edit a design it will be submitted into the design queue to be checked over, if the edit is fine it will be approved within a day or so, if the edit however invalidates one, or many, of the rules or submission guidelines, it will be removed and once again you'll receive an email explaining why. In this section you can also check on the status of your submitted designs, they will either show as Pending or Approved, if a design is rejected it is removed from both the site and your My Designs page.

Any more questions just ask

I rejected it because there was no index.html file (well, it didn't contain any html files actually). It was just images and the stylesheet in the folder, now if it was a problem with the zip you uploaded not containing that file, or if it just didn't upload / unzip properly server side I'm not sure, so I asked (sent an email via this site's contact form to your registered [roosje at kabelfoon dot net] email address) if you could check the zip contains the file and try submitting it again (sorry, I know it's annoying having to resubmit).

By the way I've just sent you another email through the contact form on your user page, let me know (reply here or email me, whichever you prefer) if you get it, also check your spam folder as I just sent myself an email through this site, and it went straight into my spam folder which can't be good...

@ramblingsoul: Yes, it appears my ZIP files don't contain an index.html :) Strange! But we don't give up ;)

Thanks for bringing it up Syuk. I wanted to also, but wasn't sure how to. I don't think it's okay in this setting. There is a time and a place for such things, and this isn't one of them IMO.