wordpress™ wank

I’m guessing Akismet went down again. Bummer.

I know this is the usual point where we sing a song of praise about how grateful we are to have it there the rest of the time, and I am, but still. Bummer.

[goes to sweep out inbox]

Yesterday I proclaimed the end of the longrunning backup plugin wank, which was a little premature of me because I hadn’t bothered checking out what Skippy thought of the ripping out of his code in this unceremonious manner.

Answer: not much.

From this I have learned to keep a weather eye on wp-testers, in the hope that it may yield further wank.

Does anyone else find it amusing that http://wordpress.org/download/nightly/ now insists that if you want to know the super-sekrit location of the nightly builds you need to subscribe to wp-testers? Surely if you are too dim to google “wordpress nightly” you need to keep the hell away from the things?

I am a little late picking up on the latest outbreak of Dashboard wank, but Lorelle’s latest outbreak of smugness compels me to comment.

Owen unwittingly sums up the problem here:

WordPress isn’t in the business of, and is not even very good at, feed aggregation

Precisely. So don’t try. If I am sufficiently geeky to care what the developers and selected friends of Matt are saying, I can subscribe to Planet WordPress in my feed reader of choice. It is infinitely quicker, more intuitive, and more convenient than clicking on multiple links from my blog admin pages. Better yet, I can cherry-pick the members of Planet WordPress I want to hear from and subscribe to them individually, so I don’t have to hear about the latest kewl theme from WTC or which member of Mike Little’s family is celebrating a birthday. Currently my Bloglines subscription to Planet WordPress is repeatedly throwing up Dougal’s Talk Like a Pirate post. Yet another reason for my imminent unsubscription.

I can even go off and find other wordpress-related blogs which for some reason Matt doesn’t think are as worthy of worldwide syndication as details of the last CD he bought. I could, for example, replace the feed for the long-defunct Wordlog with one to WordPress Station. Or subscribe to themes.wordpress.net for news on the latest illusory competition.

In short, being one of the small proportion of wordpress users with an active interest in both development and irrelevant gossip about the developers, the Dashboard is seemingly made for me; but it is, in fact, pretty useless, because the decisions about what I should find interesting are being made on my behalf. It’s like falling into somebody else’s aggregator.

Let’s be honest: the dashboard feeds are a self-promotional tool aimed at boosting traffic and, by extension, pagerank. The inconvenience of either removing it or having it clutter up your admin pages is one of the prices you have to pay for wordpress being free-as-in-beer, and its presence, like the default blogroll links, is one of the ways the devs reward themselves for their hard work. Which is fine. A little tacky, perhaps, if you’re trying to get taken seriously as a startup. But please, don’t pretend it’s anything else.

Cunningly, Andy gets things moving on the defaultification of Sandbox. The only issue I can see with his proposed changes is that it’s potentially confusing to have the default stylesheet in a different directory from the default templates. Yes, I’d prefer to pull templates from a different directory, and I’d certainly prefer not have a stylesheet in there which I’d have to overrule; but the majority of theme developers don’t seem to be comfortable with the idea (witness all the Kubrick clones which pointlessly include the same files everyone already has in their installation), and that leads me to think the majority of end-users may not like the separation either.

The other problem I can see is that it will still look like Kubrick. But that’s no doubt because Andy made the Kubrick stylesheet and he didn’t make any of the k2 ones, and how would you decide which of the k2 versions to implement? The obvious solution would be for Scott to do something minimalist, but this would not satisfy Matt’s hunger for big blue headers so is probably out of the question.

The other other problem is that I can’t find any trace of Sandbox in the Sandbox branch yet. Apart from the name. Well, it’s a start.

Meanwhile, let us celebrate the end of the longrunning backup plugin wank: Matt’s kicked it out of core, not with a bang or indeed a wp-hackers announcement, but with the following whimper:

This has been a source of security probs, and is mostly replaced by the XML import/export now.

I thought making wp-content writable was perfectly safe and anyone who said it wasn’t was lying… ah well, never mind.

Oh look, they’re officially offering hosting. It costs lots of money, of course ($500 setup + $250 per month), but then, you are paying for immunity from slashdotting. If you’re promising immunity from slashdotting to people who need immunity from slashdotting you can charge whatever you like.

I very much doubt that these sites are running off the same alpha code as we are, though. I mean, features such as the tabbed editor are getting rolled in more or less as soon as the idea’s been raised on the hackers list, and I personally wouldn’t charge people that kind of cash to be beta testers. Even if they were getting immunity from slashdotting. And even if they were really happy at being among the first to get the new shiny features. If you’re paying a premium for reliability, that applies to software as well as uptime. Like, today I can’t log in without turning off Norton, even though I swear I haven’t touched the settings. And, custom Pool headers don’t work properly, which is possibly why nobody has posted any examples. I accept this from a service I’m getting for free, but if I were paying $3000 a year I would not be anything like as forgiving.

I told myself I would do my Page of Things when they announced the VIP program, so I had better go and work on that now.

Since wordpress.com is one of the domains being scraped by Bitacle in order to garner itself some of that lovely Adsense revenue in return for no work whatsoever, feeds have been switched from fulltext to minimise their usefulness to sploggers. Apologies for any inconvenience this may cause; but, to be honest, the only reason it was fulltext in the first place was for export purposes, and I don’t need to export through RSS anymore, so, yeah.

Adam wonders whether another 100 wordpress.com themes are really necessary. My feeling is that custom CSS didn’t take off as they’d hoped, and Matt is reading this as ‘people want full-scale themes, not mere stylesheets’ rather than ‘$15 is too pricey and people are put off by the lack of official support’. No doubt the unpopularity of custom CSS will get spun as ‘oh, it was always going to be a niche option for geeks, we weren’t expecting much’; but there were copy-and-paste options for non-coders within a couple of days of the feature being launched, so that doesn’t really wash. I’m also afraid that the whole Barthleme mess may have damaged Sandbox’s chances of getting made the default theme (this would get spun as ‘we put it on wordpress.com and it wasn’t that popular’). I hope I am wrong about this, but then I remember how political the Kubrick decision was, and I wonder.

That said, at the rate of two a week a fair few of these ‘themes’ are going to be stylesheet based anyway. If you want a custom theme without paying $15 or hanging around for the VIP program to start, your best bet is to go here, find something that isn’t too hideous or horribly broken (this may take a while) and send a feedback. Or, better yet, post here so that when everyone whines about its redundancy in the announcement comments they can point to your request and say ‘look! people actually asked for this!’.

Don’t say I’m not good to you.

Meanwhile, I am totally claiming credit for the installation of Rounded, although I know perfectly well that these things are decided solely by the whim of Matt, because I want more stuff to add to my forthcoming Page of Things I Have Successfully Predicted and/or Lobbied For. Matt will then be able to claim credit for this new wordpress™ wank feature, even though these things are decided solely by the whim of me. This circularity pleases me.

I’m sorry to keep harping on about this, but… based on a remark dropped on wp-hackers about wpthemes.info, I thought I’d investigate some of the themes they currently have in use on wordpress.com. Did you know that if you download Fleur De Lys for your own install, you’ll find this little nugget in footer.php:

<?php //Please Keep the link to the original authors. Thanks ?><a href=”http://wpthemes.info/fleur-de-lys/” target=”_blank”>Fleur De Lys</a> Sponsored by <a href=”http://www.crystaloccasion.com/”>Corporate Gifts</a>

Oh dear. What to do? On principle, of course, the theme ought now to be removed from the wordpress.com presentation panel, but this would massively inconvenience all the innocent people who are already using it.

In related news, it sounds like Matt is shortly to deprive themes.wordpress.net of any official status it may or may not have:

If we have folks who would be willing to check and maintain quality of themes, maybe it’s time to resurrect the idea of a wp-themes.org repository?

I’m really, really hoping this is nothing to do with anything I’ve said. Aside from the guilt at sabotaging a user-friendly community resource that others have worked extremely hard on, and the fact that the last thing we need is yet another theme repository, I’d hate to be that important.

It is a little cheeky to suggest that Pressrow was installed in response to user demand when it had already been wp.com-ised for the benefit of http://daily.gigaom.com/ about, ooh, a month ago, but never mind.

(Actually, the only person requesting Pressrow on that thread was the guy I mocked the other day for requesting Kubrick, so I am starting to think he is an agent provocateur invented for the purposes of giving me stuff to write about.)

I am, apparently, the only person to think ‘findcreditcards.org‘ is a slightly odd home for a theme. (That link was nofollowed, by the way. It’s not hard.) Or to notice any incongruity in Pressrow being installed with this link removed (it’s still there on Om’s blog, you may want to sort that) while Barthelme gets excluded for… um, not getting digitalflowers to host the theme home page?

No, this is still not hanging together in any meaningful way.

Also, I checked, and wordpress.net is definitely still in Matt’s hands, so we may soon be in a situation where the manager of themes.wordpress.net finds himself having to remove his own themes because they don’t comply with company policy.

If I were making this stuff up, it would not be nearly as good.

Matt complains about finding a sponsored link in Barthelme, and asks the managers of theme directories what their policy is on these things.

Well, I imagine the guy who runs themes.wordpress.net is all for it, seeing as how there’s a link to ‘weber poker tables’ in the footer of his theme Water, one to ‘Poker Chips’ in Striped Plus, two more to Seven Jeans … shall I go on, or are you getting bored?

Anyway, sponsored links are apparently evil enough to get your theme banned from wordpress.com, yet not evil enough to exclude it from the official repository. Or indeed exclude you from running the official respository if you insert them in all your themes.

I am trying to find the hidden thread of logic which would make this policy coherent. Can anyone help?

Matt throws the news blog open to theme suggestions. Amid the flurry of fanboy demands for k2, this guy asks for Kubrick.

Nope, no words.