wordpress™ wank

It doesn’t sound as if the launch of 2.5 proceeded entirely smoothly, what with the usual site breakages and warnings that the ‘official’ release is a development version.

Maybe they should have waited till Tuesday?

I don’t mind the fact that .com has been left to tread water for a few months while the team focused on .org, because it was the other way round for a long time, but long-term (and I know I keep saying this) they’re going to have to learn to juggle a little better. At least this time round it gets to be beta-tested by tech-savvy volunteers rather than Snow Lovers. That was sensible.

I suppose I’m going to have to download 2.5 now so I can tear it to pieces figure out how to turn it pink, and then do a Stylish version for .com should we ever get to share in the burnt orange joy.

Oh ,and here’s your daily dose of penguin wank. Notable for CP’s denial that they ever told Mark to appoint himself an admin on some kid’s blog and shut it down. Enjoy. (No, I don’t think that post is by Mark either. See how there’s no space at the start of each sentence, the way people type when they’re not used to it? and how the blog is still up rather than ’suspended or archived’? That is the special joy of CP wank, nobody is ever who they say they are.)

Oh look, my half-baked ideas on default themery have won me a premium theme. Not of course that this was the intention, since I have no use for a premium theme (they are not .com-compatible, and in the event of this particular kitchen ever getting too hot for me I will be going the Habari route) I was just randomly spouting off.

It is true about Kubrick, though. Ever since I was at diaryland, I’ve believed that defaults should be a bit rubbish. It encourages people to branch out. Kubrick wasn’t quite rubbish enough a couple of years ago, which is why WP is still struggling to break free of the iron grip of the BBH. Also, it’s handy to be able to tell at a glance that the site in front of you isn’t worth reading. Raise your hand if you’ve ever seen an interesting blog using Kubrick. Anyone?

Also, here is Matt on wp-hackers studiously pretending that premium themes do not exist. Which is fair enough, since for the purposes of wordpress.org/extend/themes they pretty much don’t, and for that matter wordpress.org/extend/themes pretty much doesn’t exist either.

One day I will be done carping on this, but it will be because I am bored of saying the same thing over and over and over again rather than because anything has changed. Just this. If what is holding the vaporware marketplace up is really the impossibility of importing .zips into a user-friendly SVN setup, or the difficulty of building ‘a scalable payment system’ are these things an issue because they’re intrinsically difficult and time-consuming, or are they proving an issue because of the bbPress syndrome?

If you’ve ever spent any time at all in any WP support forums you’ll probably already have guessed what I mean by the bbPress syndrome. The bbPress syndrome is about not wanting to use anyone else’s code because you think you can do it yourself. I completely get this, because it’s why I have no use for a premium theme. It’s not that I think my own stuff’s better, it’s just that I can make my own themes so I will, even if they’re not as good-quality, or polished, or indeed time-and-labour-saving, as the ones I can grab off someone else’s shelf.

I have a really bad feeling that, rather than hiring or contracting folks with actual experience building scalable e-commerce sites (and, really, it’s not like taking money off people is something that has never been attempted on the internet before), Automattic are still trying to re-invent the wheel, keeping everything in-house and learning on the job. Which is a really great way of doing things, if you’re a hobbyist and the process is just as important as the end result. It is rather less great if you are trying to be a business, with investors and customers and a reputation to maintain. You’re wasting time, you’re wasting labour, and so even though it feels like you’re saving money you’re actually losing it.

I hope this isn’t the case. I hope that the bbPress syndrome was just a passing phase Matt went through on his journey towards being a businessman. But then I look at the forums and they’re still using bbPress. And I look at themes.wordpress.net and it’s still dead.

Please tell me I didn’t just read this:

Well today my blog got almost supspened. The reason: Mark said “there were complaints from people about the bad languge on this blog”.

What, so if somebody complains about your use of profanity, you risk deletion? Fuck that.

The correct response to any such complaints would be ‘kids under 13 aren’t supposed to be here anyway, because it’s illegal for us to hold data on them without parental permission’. Except of course that abiding by US law is far less lucrative than allowing the place to be overrun by children whose mummies and daddies are happy to buy them domain names and custom CSS for as many usernames as their sweet little hearts desire.

Or ‘tough, we don’t censor content unless it’s actually illegal ‘. That would work too.

I just get the feeling that people over 12 don’t really belong on this host anymore. I wonder what long-term effect this will have on the brand? And it surely brings forward the day of reckoning with the authorities.

[This was going to be a comment on my last post, but it was getting so unwieldy I thought I'd promote it]

Well, Matt seems to have these brainstorms every so often. It tends to coincide with the party season. Or, apparently, major conferences. Hard to see what Toni and the Happiness Engineers (hey! they sound like a Fifties girl group!) could do about that, other than fit Matt’s laptop with some form of alarm that starts wailing and locks down the keyboard when he mentions validation, grammar, or his own general fantasticness for giving ‘his’ software away.

Also, not all the code on wordpress.com is GPL. Nor is all the code in Akismet. Six Apart understand better than anyone else that Automattic are a business, and that letting people have wp.com out of the box or disclosing Akismet’s inner workings to spammers would make no sense whatsoever. But it looks like you’re trying to hide the fact when you refuse to concede the truth of it. Owning up to closing some of your source for sound reasons is a lot more open and honest than encouraging the fanboys to believe that everything you do is 100% open when it’s not.

Paradoxes are fun. Embrace them.

The most interesting thing about this whole brouhaha is Matt’s overreaction. He clearly feels far more threatened by Six Apart than anyone would have suspected based on, well, the facts and figures; not to mention the psychological advantage of his current success being largely due to their earlier failure. They must be really happy. It would be very easy for them to spin this as Automattic falling apart in the face of a renewed challenge from an older company that has already made its mistakes and learned from them. Or as Matt being not quite ready for the cut and thrust of big business. I think drmike is probably right in saying that it’s Toni’s job to mentor Matt through this period and stop him getting wound up by the competition, but I’m not sure he actually has the authority to tell Matt not to do anything, CEO or no CEO.

In a year or two, people may look back on this spat, coinciding as it does with the delayed release of 2.5 and the brokenness of .com, and say it was the point that WordPress jumped the shark. Certainly I’d never seen so many discontented people on the .com forums before this week. No wonder Matt is freaking out.

Baby squirrel lulz. To be honest, I still found MT slow last time I tested it, and I think the lack of one-click installs is really hurting them, and as a livejournaller I’m still sort of bitter about the gulag thing, but I do think Anil’s snark is of a whole different class to Matt’s lame cracks about validation errors.

If Matt cares so much about XHTML then maybe wordpress.com could quit stripping the slashes from the <br /> tags in my widgets (no, I don’t like sprinkling linebreaks everywhere either, but I kind of want the spacing on my sidebar not to be screwed up). Validation, like punctuation, is always a glass house in which it is inadvisable to cast the first stone.

So desperate are these people to ensure that nobody ever uses one of my skins on wordpress.com that they are now testing out a third-party photoblog theme ported to Sandbox. Fantastic!

Since this is clearly a marginally more efficient way of getting themes added than posting in the unread forum threads, has anyone got any requests? I’m already working on a gallery-style skin.

(Occasionally, too, I wonder whether one of the reasons they banned me posting to the forums to prevent me participating in the theme marketplace. One of the entry requirements is presumably the ability to provide theme support, and I had been running around threatening to release stuff for pennies . But then, this doesn’t fit with my other conspiracy theory that the forums are due to be closed entirely within the next few months. Sometimes it’s hard to keep track.)

Oh Jesus, now they want to be MySpace.

If they’d acquired DiSo, that would actually be interesting. That would be promoting the concept of people being able to use their self-hosted blogs as a social networking node, putting them in control of their software, beyond the reach of advertisers and corporations. It would really be about freedom. It would be kind of cool.

This, on the other hand, is just about turning wordpress.com into MySpace. Which is pretty much the exact opposite of putting people in control and beyond the reach of advertisers and corporations. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that only yesterday I was reading about the prospect of more ads here, either.

Still, given their recent record of taking on more projects than they can complete within a reasonable timeframe, I’m really not that worried. Till any actual changes show up on wordpress.com, it’s just more hype.

I got an email this morning from some guy wanting to buy a link on the long-neglected template site. Link was for yet another theme directory redistributing ubiquitous themes with big blue headers and adding clumsy footer links to them. Oh, and the return address was vacation-lets related.

Yeah, somehow I resisted.

I just don’t think there would be anything like the same market for these sites if themes.wordpress.net was still in a useful state. And no, touting themes from the 1.5-era and refusing to respond to takedown requests is not a useful state. Not to mention the fact that some people may actually wish to use tags without having to screw around with the code themselves. (I know, they should so be on wordpress.com so you could monetise their technophobia, but if your affiliates will keep offering these one-click installs…) The war against sponsored links has ended up producing… more sponsored links. Sponsored links on themes that didn’t originally have them. Way to go.

This really only fuels my paranoid conspiracy theory that the war against sponsored links was actually just a Trojan horse for getting control of themes.wordpress.net and killing it. This is a little paranoid even for me, but that’s the way the evidence is pointing.

Also, I was over at Ian’s blog the other day asking to steal his adsense disclaimer, and found this in the comments:

The premium themes marketplace, announced way back in November 2007, still hasn’t happened - yet designers who were up as launch partners such as ourselves were expected to quickly build and submit *exclusive* themes. We did. Then heard nothing. E-mails have gone unanswered. Nothing much appears to be happening. So we have this lovely theme, that cost us two weeks of work, doing nothing but sitting on WordPress.com’s servers, still unused. And there’s no way for us, that we can see, to patch it or update it.

So: they expected you to knock together a premium-quality theme in two weeks and then twiddle your thumbs indefinitely waiting for payday, while they hold your work to ransom? No feedback, no access, no communication? Sounds about right. Personally I’d do what most theme designers do when a custom client skips out on payment: release the work to the public for free. The whole ‘exclusivity’ thing isn’t exactly compatible with compulsory GPL-ness anyway.

This fuels my paranoid conspiracy theory that the marketplace was merely a ruse to get people to submit their premium themes direct to Matt rather than, you know, releasing them and making a profit. (That would never do.) Automattic get a set of nice themes to plunder for their corporate clients (or maybe even the plebs on .com, if they’re really lucky) without having to pay or respect anyone’s copyright.

This is cynical even for me.

What I actually think has happened is that Automattic have far more projects than they can adequately deal with at the moment. There’s 2.5, with its complete admin overhaul and fairly imminent deadline. There’s the day-to-day running of wordpress.com (want to see something scary? Google ‘wordpress.com club penguin’. The place is an illegal creche.) There’s the handling of corporate clients. Akismet. Overhauling Gravatar. Going to conferences. Vetting applications to the plugin repository. Trying to get bbPress ready for primetime so they can get TalkPress off the ground. Anything theme-related is going to be pushed right down to the bottom of the to-do list, somewhere below adding a lastFM widget to wp.com, because anything theme-related always is. They don’t have anyone on board who’s really interested in that aspect of the business (as a quick glance at the theme selection on wordpress.com will establish). Plus they’ve set themselves the task of creating a working SVN repository in a form that your average theme designer and downloader can actually use, which would be difficult at the best of times, but under current conditions is obviously unrealistic.

The trouble is, people haven’t grasped that Adsense widgets and the theme marketplace weren’t announced in interviews for the benefit of those who’d use them, they were being dangled in front of potential investors as potential future revenue sources. The point is not the feature; it’s the promise of the feature. The feature is a kind of optional by-product of the hype. It might happen one day, it might not. It doesn’t really matter.