wordpress™ wank

You know, I’ve been thinking about the apparent abandonment of the ‘non-essential features are best as plugins’ policy (first, spellcheck, now widgets) and I think it’s to make things nice and smooth for the wordpress.com users as they take off the training wheels and move on to their own server. They would, after all, be bitterly disappointed if they made the leap and then found out some of their features had gone (as disappointed as when they first found out they couldn’t change their header image here, probably) and that the only way of getting them back was to mess with icky stuff like winzip and FTP. Like, eeeew.

My other theory at the moment is that theme designers are being pressured into widgetization so that the admins will have less work to do should they decide, in the near future, to introduce a wider choice of themes for paid users. Theme choice could be to wordpress what icons are to livejournal; the killer feature which’ll persuade people to part with their cash. I bet I get told I’m wrong about this, but then this time last year Matt was saying it was better to take money from spammers than VCs, so, you know, things change.

My constructive idea of the day is that if Automattic want widgetful themes they can sponsor a lucrative prize in the theme competition, and that if still wishes to have the Perfect Theme With Support For Deprecated Tags she should bung them a book or something.

Finally, all those elitists who kept saying you had to be comfortable with PHP to develop a theme are telling the truth:

This document assumes basic PHP editing skills, though you probably won’t have to write and code of your own.

You probably won’t? Ah well, at least now the coders can claim they were right all along; that templates are software and shouldn’t be touched unless random question marks and semicolons hold no fear for you.

Oh, I have basic PHP editing skills, don’t worry about that, so the instructions are borderline comprehensible. I’m just sick of the goalposts getting moved all the time. For 1.2, it was all about total control through CSS and don’t touch the default template. For 1.5, designers suddenly had to deal with a dozen files rather than just one. (There was a lot of other stuff in 1.5 too, such as plugin hooks and internationalisation, but most people ignored that.) Now, for 2.0.3367whatever/2.5, we’re getting pressured into re-doing the work we did for 1.5 to incorporate their trendy AJAX crap.

If you are hosting WordPress on a paid server and suddenly decide that you would rather have your archives displayed above your categories and recent comments at the top, you do not need widgets to accomplish this. You just need to master cut and paste. And given the huge number of themes out there and the tiny percentage which are adopted for wordpress.com, I kind of think it’s up to the admins to widgetize them rather than expecting hundreds of designers to tweak them on the off-chance that they’ll make the Chosen Few.

I mean, yeah, I have some sympathy for the view that there are too many themes out there and we don’t need any more, but for pity’s sake just say that 1.5 themes will not be fully compatible with 2.5. Not that they are ‘broken’ and ‘need to be fixed’. Theme developers are unpaid volunteers. Some of them may even have lives. They are under no obligation whatsoever to mess with a theme that worked fine a couple of months ago just to serve your addiction to trendy AJAX crap.

So let’s be honest for once about the backwards-compatibility thing: say we’re junking 1.5 and we need shiny new themes by PHP mavens. Or maybe just admit that actually you don’t need anything from people who are not Michael Heilemann, then the rest of us can stop wasting our time and switch to developing for Textpattern.

(Oh, and don’t even get me started on the bizarreness of marking up section headers as <h2> and claiming this to be the ‘most semantically correct’ way of doing things. Sidebar labels are more important than post titles? Only if you believe people’s sidebars are more important than their content. I don’t, but evidently I am alone in this.)

ToS is smuggled in by means of a passing comment by Andy in a forum thread. No mention as yet in the news blog, though there’s a link at the bottom of the front page.

Still… terms of service! At last! And is that a privacy policy I see? Better and better. Keep this up and you may be in danger of looking professional.

Will they be doing the Yahoo! thing of deleting everyone’s cookies and making them read and agree to it before their next login? Because otherwise I’m not sure you can enforce this stuff retroactively. (I am still not a lawyer, but I’m starting to think like one. Worrying.)

Of course, what this really means is that paid features are on their way sooner rather than later. Even though I have no intention of paying for anything here, this is excellent news. Paid users act as guardians of the service for freeloaders; they help fund the infrastructure and get noisy if the service falls below standard.

(Not that freeloaders are exactly quiet, but if they’re taking your money you do have that little bit more leverage.)

Weird thing happened just now; I couldn’t access the dashboard and kept getting bounced back to the login form. So I tried switching browsers and it told me my password was incorrect, even though it wasn’t. Changing my password got me in. I don’t know whether it’s hackers responsible or pissed-off developers, but whatever, if it’s going to be a regular occurrence I’ll just have to head back to lj.

What I was going to do is wonder out loud whether the lawyers have been set on wordpress-themes.net yet, since not ONLY do they have the impertinence to use the term ‘wordpress’ in relation to a site dedicated to… um, wordpress, they ALSO release their stuff under a CC Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works licence, which is GPL-incompatible in so many ways I can’t actually be bothered to enumerate them (though I may consider doing so on payment of a hefty fee). Developers have repeatedly said that non-GPL themes are illegal, let alone plugins.

(However, most of the pages seem to be 404, so maybe they got hammered already.)

Were you wondering why the 2.0.2 announcement suddenly reappeared on your dashboard? This is why.

‘Lack of communication’, apparently. It’s amazing how some people can code PHP yet struggle with email.

I really need to figure out how to do diffs, since the patch I did yesterday against inconsistent application of ids in edit-form-advanced.php was on my RC1 install and stuff may have changed since then.

The bug is this: some of the widgets on the post page have ids, some don’t. There doesn’t appear to be any particular rationale behind which ones do and which ones don’t, it’s just random sloppiness that only people as anal as myself are ever going to notice. The reason it matters to me is that I WANT MY BASIC POST PAGE BACK DAMNIT. No passwords. No authors. No comments, even. (I gave up fighting the spam wars months ago.)

If they have IDs, I can hide them with CSS. If they don’t, I can’t. It’s that simple.

Oh, and my blue navbar just came back! Welcome home, blue navbar!

Still no word on stats, of course.

(Not that I’m personally bothered by this, I’m just wearing my consumer advocate hat.)

So. Template Contest Guy the Third (who so far does not display the levels of jerkiness and incompetence of his predecessors, for which the gods of theming be thanked) decides it’s time he got the word out about the new competition, so that at least some of those who participated in the last couple of disasters may be tempted to have another go. Obvious thing to do here is ask the devs to mention it. Donncha obliges. Matt says ‘great! more themes! thanks for taking this on’ and rushes to make a post on his blog tells him he needs to change his domain name, so that the competition URL ends up changing for the second time.

Jesus, that’s petty.

I must have missed the dead blog post about that. How did I manage that? I’m pretty good at keeping up with the dead blog, because a) it’s like, dead, so there’s not that much to keep up with and b) it’s in my frickin’ dashboard. So I must be slipping. Because there’s no way you could reproach someone for not reading a page on wordpress.org that’s never been publicised, and for all we know might have been thrown up in thirty seconds as a response to that email. It would be like blaming them for not reading the notorious spam articles.

If you can’t put ‘wordpress’ in the domain name of the wordpress theme competition, where is this lunacy going to end? What about all those people with ‘wordpress’ subdomains? What about me? Am I going to have to rename this site ‘wanky wank wank wank’, or would ‘wordpress™ wank’ be acceptable?

Seriously, though. Does this mean that nobody can register a domain including the letter combination ‘w-o-r-d-p-r-e-s-s’? Not even the developers? And the owners of the trademark can’t approve any applications to use it? Surely, if you own something, it’s yours to dispose of as you see fit?

I’m really struggling to see how a site dedicated to a wordpress theme competition — affiliated with the administrator of themes.wordpress.net, not to mention the almighty Podz — is compromising or diluting the trademark in any way. It links to the official site. It’s not squatting. It’s not making a profit. It’s perfectly clear about its remit.

Talk about lawyers all you like. Talk about the mysterious ‘wordpress foundation’, or ‘wordpress inc’ or whatever pseudo-organisation officially owns the trademark, if you must. It still looks petty. It looks like another case of Matt pulling rank because somebody tried to do something he wasn’t in charge of.

(Anyway, don’t the lawyers have better things to worry about than volunteer projects taking the name of the software in vain? Don’t they have a wordpress.com terms of service to be writing?)

It used to be that I could stroll into the .com forums and actually help people.

You can’t edit your theme. This is for security reasons. Please read the FAQ. The only way of exporting entries is through RSS. This thread should be helpful. There are no plugins on wordpress.com. Please read the FAQ. Javascript is not allowed for security reasons. Inline styles are automatically stripped. This is so that no-one can insert malicious code and hack your blog.

OK, so any parrot with a reasonable command of bookmarks can do that. It’s not particularly interesting or challenging, which is why the majority of people leave the forums aside and concentrate on blogging, but somebody has to do it. It does no good to say ‘well, most of these questions are FAQs anyway, if people searched they’d find the answer’ because in the real world people often don’t search. In any case the search form on the forums is cunningly hidden, plus many .com users aren’t native speakers of English and find one-line answers far more comprehensible than lengthy FAQs.

But I go in today, and it’s all Help! my stats are broken! and I can’t get to my dashboard and I can’t create new pages and I can’t delete old pages… and all I can say to these people is send a feedback. And I feel bad about telling these people to send a feedback, because many of them will have done so already, and I cannot promise them they will be helped even if they do.

I’m not going to breeze in to that blog stats thread and go all Pollyanna on them saying ‘relax! they’re working on it! wordpress.com is such a great FREE service, I’m sure it’ll be fixed soon!’. There’s been a few Pollyannas on there lately and I always have to bite my tongue around them. It may be a reasonable assumption to make that the admins working on it, but we don’t know that they are. We have no confirmation that they are. They might be silently fixing security holes in the downloadable version. They might be distributing t-shirts in Austin. They might be sleeping.

If they’re working on it, they can tell us themselves. They have a news blog. They have individual blogs. They have the ability to start a new thread in the forum apologizing for all the recent issues and reassuring people that they’re being fixed.

Sorry, but I really don’t feel like firefighting today.

I finally got around to trying out the Tiger admin plugin. Oh my god, I’m in love. OK, so the blue is a little bright for me, but… the sidebar! the dinky icons! the pretty buttons! Finally, wordpress looks like a proper web application.

Of course, lack of IE support means we’ll never see it here… and its inclusion as a plugin (if we ever get plugins, like in 2008 or something) would probably piss off the shuttle team who are the Official Admin Redesigners. Still. Pretty pretty pretty. I had to share that with you to counterbalance my usual stream of negativity and badness.