Ilia Alshanetsky has this new post on his blog today with a new contest for all of you aspiring developers out there to help him with the look and feel for his FUDForum software.

In the past few years FUDforum has grown quite a bit in both the offered functionality and the user base. However, aside from a few tweaks the layout of the forum has remained largely unchanged. While the current layout works quite well for most people, there is a clear want to update the layout to something more interesting.

Hence this contest, the goal being to devise a new better, faster and prettier default theme (layout) for the forum, which would improve the user experience. Aside from a new and improved default template some additional templates maybe included in the stock distribution to give forum deployers greater flexibility as far as appearance out of the box.

So, if this has piqued your interest and you have some time to work on some new templates for the system in an effort to help FUDForum become more widely used. He's looking to have the layouts in within the next 2 months, at which point a vote will determine which of them are the best rated. The prize (aside from his gratitude) is a 4GB iPod mini, and authors of designs that get adpoted as FUDForum theme will recieve a 512MB iPod shuffle.

For all of the details, check out this forum post...