wordpress™ wank

I’m trying to justify entering the competition on the grounds that the masses should get at least one hook-complete, localisation-ready (so it doesn’t have any .po or .mo files, what do you want? blood? at least it’s marked up ready for someone else to extract the strings), code-validating, usable and halfway nice-looking theme out of it. I don’t have any use for any of the prizes (just as well, as they will no doubt go to friends of the judges) and the site itself has been radio-silent for weeks, which is vaguely worrying.

But no doubt our local theme-guru will be submitting a flawless design of her own which will render all other efforts puny and redundant. I wouldn’t, after all, go around ripping into other people’s crappy bug-ridden themes if I wasn’t prepared to put my money where my mouth was and give the community something better. Carping from the sidelines is easy (not to mention fun) but it’s much more constructive to put together an example of good practice which people can actually use. I’m really looking forward to seeing hers.

I hate seeing repeats of the same world over and over too. I mean, geez. Give us some new worlds. This one is getting old.

(I’d put ‘failure to proofread’ right up there with the other no-nos. It makes you look silly, and silly when you’re trying to pontificate is never good.)

Ongoing list. I’ll add to it as I find more. Contributions welcome.

• Blogger: Terms of Service
• Easyjournal Terms of Service
• Journalspace Terms of Use
• Livejournal Terms of Service
• MySpace.com Terms of Use Agreement
• Squarespace - Terms of Service
• Tabulas Terms of Service
• TypePad Terms of Services
• whirrl video blogging: Acceptable Use Policy
• Xanga Terms of Use

I can’t be bothered to link to all the livejournal clones which use the same text as livejournal, but be assured they’re out there. Also, diary-x used to have one, but their entire site is basically destroyed at the moment after their server went kaput with no recent backups, which goes to show that even non-serious contenders think it worth their while to have some form of contract.

The task of bringing hundreds more crappy redundant themes to the masses has been taken on by some Malaysian guy named Justin. Woo! He cleverly deals with the problems of all previous contests by keeping all the themes secret until after the competition. Genius. This way, he avoids bandwidth trouble (they’re all getting handed over to themes.wordpress.net when it’s all over, which is much better than establishing yet another repository) and all the post-result comments saying ‘WTF, why did that piece of shit win when this one is obviously sooooo much better, whoever your judges are they clearly don’t know shit about design’ etc. etc.

(Well, ok, they’re still going to get the post-result comments. If your judges were competent to judge a design competition then you wouldn’t be ashamed to announce who they were.)

There are, of course, no lists of criteria by which the prizes will be judged, and no requirement that themes be out-of-box XHTML and CSS-valid, include all necessary plugin hooks, be i18n-ready, include documentation and have authors willing to provide support. So, once more, we’ll be getting a deluge of crappy inadequate themes rather than a sensible number of decent ones. Joy.

functions.php is a nice thing, though, so I may re-style an old template and bung it their way. Hell, if this piece of migraine-inducing junk could win two awards in the last contest, anything’s worth a go.

Run, don’t walk, to the delightful wp-forums list, where the mavens have decided to pile on a newbie helper who made the HEINOUS mistake of linking back to his sites in every answer he gave, evidently unaware of the official wordpress line that all linkbacks are eeeeeeeeevil (unless of course they are to the developers).

As this official policy was not, at the time, stated anywhere on the forum outside of Podz’s head, he feels a little aggrieved and resorts to talking about fanciful things like ‘democracy’ and ‘openness’ and, bless him, ‘accountability’. Like these concepts have meaning in the wanky world of wordpress.

In every other forum it would rock me to my socks to have someone say, “Awww, thanks for helping, but can you remove the freaking sig?!!?!!”

It’s just you people. And I admit to the failing of finding it hard to understand.

Nowhere in those responses does anybody say ‘thanks for helping’. Are they so used to ungrateful users that they’ve forgotten that the phrase exists? Or do they now have so many support volunteers they can afford to alienate people who actually know about mySQL? Or are they just confident that he will not follow through on his promise to leave the forums for ever and ever, since they have never followed through on theirs?

(You are not a real wordpress support volunteer until you have declared you are leaving the forums for ever and ever. Twice.)

I do like, by the way, the suggestion of adding ‘report this post’ links so that the proletariat can help out with spam-and-abuse spotting. However, the chances of useful features getting rolled into coded-in-a-weekendPress seem slim.

Here is an ongoing request thread for WP-Andreas09 to be added to the wordpress.com theme selection.

Let’s look at the points for and against:

For:
blue header? check
ability to change header colour, in half-hearted attempt to placate people who want to customise their own damn templates because, like, every other blog host on the planet lets you do it? check
lots of grey? check
use of gradients? check
sans-serif font? check
popularity with the fanboys? check

Against:
it has three columns rather than the standard two. Hmm, that might be a bit, you know, different.

I’m not a fan of three-cols myself — they look cramped at lower resolutions, and who really needs two sidebars full of crap? — but, as anyone who’s dabbled in templating will be aware, there is a big demand for them from people who inexplicably want to fill two sidebars full of crap. As there is not that much scope for filling sidebars with crap on wordpress.com (what? no weatherpixies?) it could be argued that a three-col design here would be redundant.

But oh! look at the shiny blue header! that is similar yet subtly different to all the other shiny blue headers! what is to be done?

ETA: it was to be added, of course. never let it be said that Matt can resist the lure of the blue header

I’m still not a lawyer, but the continuing absence of any kind of contract with users is getting silly:

WP.com lacks a solid set of rules. Period. Therefore everything is arguable. That also means coercion is left to the admins’ free will.

See, if this goes on any longer I’m afraid I’m going to get conspiracy theorist on you and end up suggesting that the reason we don’t have a ToS is so the admins can delete your account without it having to meet a pre-existing list of criteria; though it seems to me that this could easily be got round by having a clause stating that the admins can delete your blog anytime they like, depending on their mood.

Hell, it’s not like anyone reads the thing when they’re signing up and would be put off by that statement. It’s actually for the benefit of the people running the site, because when Splogger or Pornographer sends you a nasty email asking where their blog’s gone (there appears to be no user notification when a site is removed, maybe because the admins feel their keyboards would be soiled by having to communicate with such people) you tell them ‘look, you signed up to these terms agreeing not to do X Y and Z, you broke your contract with us by doing them, now shut up and go away’.

Whereas, at the moment, Splogger or Pornographer has nowhere been told that spam and pornography are unacceptable content (maybe they’re not, and the reason we don’t have ToS is because Matt wants wordpress.com to be a bastion of anarchist hacker freedom; don’t laugh! I will have you know #bantown have at least one blog on here), let alone had to agree not to post any. And yeah, I know ’spam is bad’ is common sense, but since when has common sense ruled the internet? If the founder of wordpress thought it was ok to put hidden spam on wordpress.org, it is not inconceivable that a random user on wordpress.com may also see spam as a legitimate fundraising enterprise. If you don’t want people to do stuff, you should probably tell them not to do it rather than rely on their mindreading powers or sense of honour.

Also, if they are planning to introduce paid services without any kind of ToS… [shudders] OK, you don’t tell people to give you money without setting out your mutual rights and obligations in some form. Well, ok, you can, but if they are sane they will refuse, and taking money from the mentally incompetent is, like, really wrong.

114 bugs in a major release? (And that’s just the ones that they’ve dealt with). Hell, no wonder it took them twice as long as usual to come out with the fixed version.

All the sane people who were hanging on are now free to ‘upgrade’. Though, in the lack of any reported security threats to 1.5.37893 and the lack of important new features in 2.0.1 the general consensus seems to be that this would sort of be a waste of time. Unless you really like blue admin pages.