wordpress™ wank

• Matt opposes RTL support in the default theme on the grounds that it’s not like many Arabic speakers use WP. (Perhaps this is due to lack of RTL support in the default theme. Chicken and egg, anyone?)
• Matt opposes gettexting the default theme on the grounds of cruelty to theme designers. As a monoglot PHP-averse theme designer, I thank him for his concern, but actually I had no objections to making my stuff l10n-friendly because a) if something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing properly, even if getting the necessary information out of codex and the forum is akin to bleeding a stone and b) I am aware that not everyone is an English-speaking American.
• Matt sings the praises of diversity

Also, the silence which greets the ‘hey, what about Sandbox?’ comment is deafening. I guess that means I can get started on porting it to Habari.

The good news is, theundersigned has updated themes.wordpress.net and is planning to follow through on that appeal for volunteers he made six weeks ago.

The bad news?

Actually, I’ve got no objections to Thomas hosting his ads there (and yes, I’ve checked the source and the Adsense ID is the same as on his personal site). If Automattic won’t pay him for the time and effort he puts into running their repository, he’s entitled to seek other forms of recompense.

What I am interested to know is whether he required or sought permission to do so, given that the theme viewer is ‘the official theme directory’ and hosted for free (I’m assuming it’s still for free?) on one of Matt’s domains. Because even though I don’t mind individuals making a personal profit out of community resources, I’m betting that there are some free-beer fundamentalists out there who will.

(Come to that, wasn’t Mark one of those shouting about the general scuzziness of putting ads on a theme repository this time last year? And didn’t Matt appear to agree with him? Still, a lot of things have changed since then. For example, nobody posts chatlogs on Codex anymore.)

Apart from anything else, if you’re letting people run their own ads on a wordpress.net site, people are going to be asking louder than ever why they can’t run their own ads on a wordpress.com site. Especially seeing as how most of us update more frequently than once a month.

Some of the people on this thread are boggling my mind. If it’s so important to you to have a ‘professional’ looking site and you can’t cope with it looking crappy for a few hours, why are you blogging on a free host? let alone a free host that’s used as a testbed? I mean, when Dreamhost went down recently, everyone who whined on the status blog got slapped down by fanboys telling them you get what you pay for. Heaven knows what new orifices they’d rip for people who aren’t even paying.

Mark continues to oppose the idea of status.wordpress.net, for reasons which are not exactly clear to me but sound like he just doesn’t want another blog to maintain when he’s already making status posts to the forum and replying to feedback. Which is fair enough, but completely fails to address the problem of where do people get their information if they can’t access the forums or feedback because the site is down?

(And don’t say that will never ever happen again. That’s a surefire way of ensuring that it will.)

But then, I suppose I’m making the same category error as the people who need their free blogs to look professional 24/7, demanding a level of service that, as a freeloader, I’m actually not entitled to. If the site is down, it is down. It will be up again when it is up again. That’s pretty much all they can ever tell you on status pages anyway, because if they’re silly enough to estimate when things will be back to normal that automatically jinxes them and adds another day of downtime. It’s just that, even if the information is not actually useful and we don’t actually need it, we tend to want it anyway.

wordpress.org goes down. The forums are gone and the ideas forum is throwing a ‘cannot connect to DB’ error message. Concurrently, Matt posts to all lists advising everyone on 2.1.1 to upgrade to the as yet unannounced 2.1.2. How long ago was 2.1.1 announced? Ten days, according to one of my randomly selected dashboards.

I’m not saying these facts are connected, but if bad stuff has happened to your site and you then urgently tell everyone to upgrade, what are we supposed to think?

edited: apparently the server was insecure rather than the code. This is comforting.

Oh. I’m on one of their servers. Maybe not so much.