wordpress™ wank

Woah. WordPress.org has been taking money to host spam links on the front page, hiding them with CSS and not telling anyone about it.

I was this close to pitying the demented fanboys who believed that the project had some integrity and were going to get their illusions shattered, but then I read some of their ‘waah! you are crucifying poor Matt who has done so much good for others! I hate you! waaah!’ comments and remembered the only thing I should be pitying them for is their impenetrable stupidity.

Also, Mr. King is now refusing to release his theme browser code to rival theme repositories. But how can he do that? It’s GPL, surely? It comes within spitting distance of a WordPress installation so it must be. Do you think we can sue him?

I’m off to redirect my wordpress link to a page that won’t benefit spammers, now. I’m thinking maybe textpattern.com, that would really mess with people’s heads.

now I am merely disappointed that Mr. King, knowing he’d lost the argument, did his usual trick of closing the thread before I could inform redneck Chad that not all theme developers are male.

I know, it’s shocking, isn’t it? Next thing you know they’ll be letting us code plugins.

So. I finally send off the bloody theme and I get ‘ooh, I don’t know if CC Attribution is GPL-compatible…’ which to be honest I was half-expecting, though I can’t work out if he’s being genuinely stupid (it is listed as a GPL-compatible licence on a page he linked to himself on his own site) or just looking for an excuse not to let me enter because of my comments about the judging. Which is fine, because as you know I just love to have excuses to rage against the egotistical misogynist demented fanboys of the WordPress community.

Oh, and of course nobody has bothered to explain why it is so crucial that all templates be GPL-compatible, and why we are expected to use a licence designed for software rather than templates, but that would be because we’re not expected to question these things. Though I have to say that a system where this and this and this go in no questions asked, while my perfectly presentable 3-col theme gets umm-ed and ahh-ed about just because I dared ask to be credited, is just a tiny bit screwed.

Did somebody actually submit a theme with a bunch of pictures of themselves, their family, friends and dog on it, or am I hallucinating?

The only reason I started posting to the WP forums after a year’s break was that I needed help with theming and the wiki is inadequate. Of course, when you mention that the wiki is inadequate you get the stock response of ‘add to it yourself’. Yes, and if I knew what I was supposed to be adding I would, but if I were in the position of being able to answer my own questions I would not be bothering with your poxy support system in the first place. I would be getting on with coding the bloody theme, would I not?

Meanwhile they’re bitching on the wp-docs list that they have too many user accounts and any that are inactive after six months should be deleted. Look, you either welcome occasional contributors or you kick them out. Can’t have it both ways.

(We already had this debate a couple of months back, when lurkers on the list were cordially invited to start contributing to the wiki immediately or piss off. I would have unsubscribed back then, were it not for the fact that this was what they wanted.)

So, I am having to learn about conditional statements in PHP because the wiki tells lies. No, I’ll rephrase that. I am having to learn about conditional statements in PHP because the wiki predicated the existence of certain templates which the developers, in their infinite wisdom, had decided not to bother with after all. Now, I don’t think it’s that arcane to want your archives for a single day laid out differently from your archives for an entire year, but apparently this is a rare and strange requirement requiring the use of conditional statements, so yeah.

I still don’t particularly see the need for separate templates at all, but the more you have, the more ‘complete’ your work will be deemed to be, so I’m throwing in everything I can think of. It’s a bit like those essays where you tell the teacher what they want to hear rather than what you actually think. Competitions, I find, are as soul-rotting as customs, but without the rewards. The only decently-sized prize ($150) is getting assigned randomly, which rather depressingly suggests that the lead developer doesn’t believe anyone will come up with a design worthy of winning and has decided to turn the whole thing into a lottery. So somebody who’s done a new stylesheet for an existing theme is just as likely to win $150 as someone who’s gone to the trouble of learning about conditional statements.

Why have I wasted so much time on this stupid theme? I am officially a mug.

I have now established to my own satisfaction that a Creative Commons license is GPL-compatible, and if anyone tries to tell me I can’t insist on people keeping the credit on my theme I will hit them with links, legal jargon, and the usual pretentious stuff about artistic integrity. It looks like I will have to give up the ‘don’t use my stuff for commercial purposes’ condition though, and that makes me sad. If businesses are too cheap to fork out for an MT license they should at least have to pay for a decent WordPress template.

Stupidity surrounding the themes contest so far: randoms claiming ‘all skill levels are welcome’ (thanks for that, hideous and badly-coded layouts are such a valuable contribution to the community), a $40 Starbucks card for the best no-frills template (that’s going to be useful to anyone outside America), and people being bribed to come up with a hokey late-’90s-styles layout that looks like a Real Diary (I am so tempted to take them up on this).