wordpress™ wank

Good news for a change: one of the WP projects for the Google Summer of Code is ‘easier template tags’. That’s fast, they’ve only been considering it eleven months.

Also, two of the ten projects revolve around finding out what the competition are doing so we can VANQUISH them mwhahahah! When did WP become ‘the best CMS out there’? My impression was always that they were marketed as a blog tool which you can optionally use as a CMS; competing with MT and Blogger rather than Drupal and Joomla. (Overhauling the page interface strikes me as a very CMS-orientated project as well.)

If they are seeking to reposition themselves as a CMS, that’s an interesting development. It suggests that, in future, those who just want to blog will be steered towards wordpress.com, with wordpress.org becoming an increasingly bulky and complex tool aimed at power users. Ah well, we’ll still have 2.0.

Go vote
I don’t care if you mark it down, as long as you give sensible reasons rather than ‘MATT IS TEH HAxXOR U R JUST JELOUS’. And yes, I’ve saved a copy just in case a technical glitch causes it to disappear.

(I stopped short of suggesting, in the interests of transparency, a link to Automattic. Might not fly too well with the FBFs.)

I really need to start keeping copies of every comment I post on photomatt or the news blog. For example, last night I wrote a reponse to this, which touched upon the fact that plugin authors and theme authors tend to be coming from completely different places.

So: theme authors, in general (all of this is a massive generalization and there are always going to be exceptions) care more about getting credit for their work because they conceive of it as creative, and authorship is important in the creative arena. Demanding credit for your work is par for the course in the world of free blog templates, and a lot of the people doing it don’t even know what pagerank is. They do it automatically, the same way an artist signs the bottom corner of her paintings or a writer has his name on the front cover of a book. (Yes, I can hear you snorting, code guys, but may I remind you a lot of books and paintings aren’t that wonderful either?)

Plugin authors, in general, care more about the philosophy of open source and conceive of their work as functional. Hackers think making themes is easy — anyone can throw together some CSS and a Photoshop image or two, this stuff is child’s play compared to regex — and don’t understand why these people are being so precious. Designers admit that making a crappy theme is easy, but want them to acknowledge that making good themes, which are aesthetically pleasing as well as functional, is hard, and requires a measure of artistic flair and originality. Since hackers think ‘aesthetically pleasing’ consistutes a generic Big Blue Header and links in Internet Blue, it is difficult to get them to concede this point.

(As far as monetization is concerned, don’t forget that the people with the skills to write plugins are substantially more likely to have a decently-paid day job on the strength of them. Nor that your average plugin is quite a bit smaller than your average theme, making bandwidth costs not nearly as high.)

We all know which side of this fence Matt is on, and hence it is no surprise that my original comment appears to have vanished into the ether. C’est la vie. I know, I know, I should have trackbacked in the first place rather than rely on the comment actually appearing (what was I thinking?) but I thought I’d spammed you enough with this lately.

This, I suppose, is the main point I’ve been trying to make:

Theme viewer is plastered with adsense and selling text links. It is cashing on efforts and hours spent by theme creators. WordPress.com cashes on user’s content by putting adsense on users blog. Moreover, WordPress.com’s TOS specifically forbids users to monetize their blogs in any way.

Isn’t this a trend where users & developers contribute to the community, and they are not allowed to make any money for their efforts. But, community owners make cash on the back of users, designers & developers.

And apparently bringing up Spamgate constitutes a ‘personal attack’. Whatever. I don’t think you can argue it’s irrelevant (though no doubt many fanboys would try). If nothing else, it explains the whole poacher-turned-gamekeeper stance. If nothing else, it is another example of Matt considering wordpress.org and wordpress in general as his personal property. If nothing else, it reminds us how the community, as a whole, were extraordinarily forgiving of how Matt abused their trust, and gave him a free pass for being a kid, and a Good Guy, and saying he was sorry. And how he’s not willing to extend the same tolerance to people who also might be young, and naive, and blinded by the dollars that SEO guys are waving in front of them.

Did Matt get kicked off wordpress.org for what he did? Don’t be silly. Mostly, he just learned he could pull any stunt he wanted and the fanboys would understand. After all, nothing he could do again would ever be quite that bad, whether it was ripping off other people’s templates without permission, or sneaking ads onto people’s blogs without warning them when they signed up, or that shady snap-preview-enabled-by-default thing. Most of that stuff is just screwing wordpress.com users anyway. Who cares about those no0bs? It would be so incredibly ungrateful of them to complain about all that great stuff they’re getting for FREE!

Which, in a sense, it would. I am not expecting this place to be run by moral paragons who are above reproach. What on earth would I have to write about, if it was? I just dislike the double standards, the sense that there is one rule for the people at the top and another for the ones at the bottom. I don’t like the holding of other people to a higher standard than that which you have set yourself, the expectation that they will behave better than you have done for less reward, or else be punished in a way you never were. I can’t, personally, accept that requiring linkbacks on a theme you’ve made yourself, or specifying non-commercial use, is ethically more dubious than stealing another person’s theme and claiming the credit for it, or advertising your commercial site in a plugin. Even though the lawyers might say that the former is illegal and the latter just dandy. I am not a lawyer, and this time there is no but.

Further sorties in Matt’s ongoing crusade to ensure mere designers do not profit from their work:

• Small Potatoes is rewarded for caving into pressure to relicence his CC themes as GPL with precious linkjuice from the master’s PR 8 blog. (Remind me how he got that ranking again? Oh yes, I remember. It was the blogosphere’s collective fascination with his myspace-esque posts arranging meetups in random cities.)
• Matt takes his bright new ‘censor all mention of sponsored themes’ concept to the Ideas forum (h/t Adam). Now, if I were in the business of activism and believed there was, or ever had been, such a thing as the wordpress community (as opposed to a loose grouping of rabid fanboys and the occasional malcontent, none of whom can seriously expect to have their views taken into account), I would be urging everyone to go and vote this down. You know, in order to remind Matt that wordpress.org is not his sole property and that the ideas forum was invented to give the community a voice, seeing as Matt has more than enough outlets to parade his prejudices already. Except, of course, wordpress.org is Matt’s sole property and the ideas forum was invented as a PR exercise in the aftermath of a kinda-sorta fork project by people who objected to his control-freakery. So that would be pointless.

  Awesome if it happened, mind.

• I don’t like defending sponsored themes but thin ends, wedges, the Voltaire principle, all that. I don’t like people being kicked off forums for the crime of making money. I don’t like people using sponsored themes, attempting to conceal their origin, and then coming all holier-than-thou about the evilness of sponsored themes. If they’re so evil, don’t bloody use them. Or use them, and quit whining about their evilness. As I’ve said before, if SEO people have discovered the joys of theming you only have the default blogroll to blame. And if, in the face of getting banned for being honest about what they’re doing, they resort to putting their links in divs styled margin-left:-9000px I don’t really see how that’s going to help the users avoid spammy layouts either.

The theme sponsorship hysteria is boring me too much to blog about it properly. Here, have some links:

• anonyrandom kicks off flamewar at the everborken Theme Viewer
• some designers appear touchingly ignorant of the WP ethos that you MUST work for free or be labelled moneygrabbing scum
• WTC weighs in with a new policy of full disclosure.
• Matt decides to pay his monthly visit to the .org forums in order to a) reiterate the party line that all themes MUST be GPL and b) deliver the slapdown to themey, who is clearly making far too much money out of WP for somebody not on the Automattic payroll.

The implementation of a GPL-only, ad-free resource at wordpress.org/extend/themes is getting likelier and likelier, though it remains to be seen which repository’s code will get stolen borrowed and improved to do it.

[uls still broken in Unsleepable, I see]

Now that Automattic are far too sensible and corporate for AFD silliness, the Habari guys have stepped into the void with ForkPress.

I actually think their logo may be better than WP’s real one.

Of course, this is mostly a way of getting publicity for their developers release. Which reminds me, I need to svn up again and see whether themes are working yet.