wordpress™ wank

It being over a year since the senseless killing of themes.wordpress.net, Automattic have thrown up some content at extend/themes in a vain attempt to stop people bitching about it.

I say ’some content’.

Three themes.

[laughs for two minutes straight.]

They couldn’t even be bothered to include the ones they’re using on wordpress.com. There’s the photoblog one by Matt’s pet designer friend, the inevitable Prologue, and Tarski. The authors of that one must have handed development over to Automattic, or maybe they’ve just been doing so much inhouse mutilation they think it constitutes a new theme.

The so-called preview blog has evidently been thrown together in four minutes. It doesn’t have blockquotes, it doesn’t have an entry truncated with <!- -more- ->, it doesn’t have multiple pages (let alone child pages), it doesn’t have any trackbacks or pingbacks, it doesn’t have an oversized image, it doesn’t have any links in comments, it doesn’t have a password-protected post… I could go on, but I’m sure you’re getting bored.

Oh, and naturally your theme will have to get past the Great Firewall of Matt, so unless you’re a personal friend of his I wouldn’t bother uploading anything. Well, you could try, just don’t expect it to be published before Christmas. He’s a busy guy.

As for the requirements, it’s more important to include a version number than to ensure your theme supports the current version of WP. (This is perhaps understandable, since Prologue apparently breaks in 2.6). You don’t even have to include widgets, let alone tags or gravatars. As for valid xhtml or CSS, this is not important either. It doesn’t have to work in multiple browsers or resolutions. Basically you can upload any crap you like, as long as it doesn’t have sponsored links in it and you don’t demand people keep your linkback. Because vanity links are sooo much more evil than broken layouts

So yeah, another one-fingered salute to theme designers and users. Somehow, I doubt the likes of wpthemesfree will be quaking in their boots.

There are so many responses by bubel on the forums about how you absolutely can NOT use your own themes on wordpress.com that not only am I now convinced the theme marketplace has finally been shelved but I’m starting to think custom CSS must be on the way out as well This user wanting multiple themes on the same blog, for example, could have been profitably directed to Sandbox, where anyone with a fair degree of CSS competency can achieve different looks for different types of pages. If it was a volunteer giving that answer, I’d just shrug my shoulders and assume they didn’t know what can be achieved with the CSS upgrade, but if it’s staff you have to assume that they have some other reason for not mentioning it.

This sucks, as I was seriously thinking of offering custom custom CSS skins for a small fee even though such services are officially discouraged. Ah well. I should really apply my efforts to learning Drupal instead.

No. I did.

This is unacceptable. Automattic want to control who gets to comment on my blog. Even spam gets sent to a queue where I can approve it if I want. Hence, I have emptied the contents of my Akismet queue onto my front page, since it is clearly more acceptable to our hosts than comments from my readers.

Also, if you must bitch about people in private blogs, I find that spaces or other miscellaneous characters in the url are very good at preventing those embarrassing trackbacks, assuming of course that your readers are au fait with the mechanics of copy/paste.

I was going to write a post about how it might be a good idea to carry out usability testing before a major admin redesign rather than after, and how it might also be sensible to rip off the Tiger interface before paying Happy Cog to make you something custom, but it will just have to wait.

Dear Matt,

Since this would never make it past moderation on this post I am putting it somewhere that people other than you and I will actually have an opportunity to read it. I agree that Monotone looks all kinds of cool and clever, and people have only been asking for a photoblog theme for about two years so it is timely too. However, don’t you think it is a little bit tacky that we have to view CSS in order to find out who actually made the thing? I’ve already seen blog posts crediting it to Automattic. OK, I’m aware that more than one shoutout in a week might destroy your hard-won reputation for hating on designers, but really, would it hurt that much to mention the actual designer somewhere visible? If you don’t ‘fess up on the wordpress.com announcement post I’m going to have to blow your cover. Oh wait. I just did. And don’t think about messing with style.css. I made screenshots.

love, that girl again

P.S.: leaving your car unlocked is not a touching expression of your faith in the fundamental goodness of humanity. It’s just dumb.

Perishable Press on, among other things, what is wrong with the plugin repository, and the quiet removal of the community-maintained plugin list on Codex.

I don’t need to spell out how this relates to the long slow death of themes.wordpress.net (where not even the previews work anymore) or the wider strategy of transferring control of community resources from the community to Automattic. Third-party theme repositories are thriving because everyone knows themes are an effective form of linkbuilding: add your link to every theme you redistribute, sell ads, profit! It’s not ideal from a user perspective because you get more links cluttering up your footer, but it’s ever so much better than having to rely on the moribund place your dashboard sends you to, full of broken old themes you have to evaluate on the basis of screenshots. The plugin community doesn’t have any such incentive to build its own resources; so it doesn’t happen; so if Matt happens not to like you, or your plugin, or your plugin’s licence, it’s going to be very hard for potential users to find you.

Is it just me, or does that not seem very open?

We seem to be arriving at a point where we rely purely on third-party commercial interests to create and maintain open community resources. It’s become too time and money-consuming for volunteers to do for free. And .org/extend is waaaaay at the bottom of Automattic’s priorities, because serving ads on talkpress is going to make them more money for less effort than selling themes, and plugin distribution is not going to make them anything at all. So I’m wondering whether Matt’s going to have to start rethinking his hostility to those who sell links, charge for themes, and try to profit out of wordpress without contributing a line of core code, because right now they’re keeping the theme community going. And without a theme industry, what would you have? Ye Olde Kubrick and some ancient thing Dave Shea threw together in his spare time. Impressive.

In the course of breaking everything else, they accidentally fixed global tags again. Obviously Matt fixed it as soon as he found out, gaming Google being so much more important than letting people upload images or check their spelling.

I think they will lose a few people over this dashboard thing. 150-post threads where staff do not bother responding are never good. You’d think they’d have put someone on firefighting duty, publically addressing people’s concerns and giving some vague impression that they listen to their users, even if that isn’t actually true. Clearly we are going with the SUP school of community management (’so what if a vocal minority of customers hate us? they can go cause trouble on someone else’s service’) rather than Six Apart’s (’we’re so sorry we upset you! we love you! we’re listening! right up to the point we sell you out!’)

Fair enough. I mean, we all know they’re not going to listen to their users, so it would be disingenuous to pretend.

It’s the weekend! Hence we’re having a major upgrade!

I am, admittedly, the only person in the world who thinks the colours are an improvement on that godawful dark blue (though that blazing orange bar in the middle of the page? what were you smoking?) but we now have two different navbars and it’s messing with my brain. I used to think 1024×768 was a perfectly average resolution but no, apparently we’re a disabled minority who need to be SHOUTED at. Logging in is like having someone standing in your personal space and talking VERY LOUDLY AND DISTINCTLY. And yet the pimpage and recent activity links are teeny-tiny. If the massive fonts in the ‘Right Now’ panel are comfortable for you, those are going to be too small. Scale, people, scale. It’s all over the place.

Why can’t I move modules around? I don’t care about stats, I care about recent activity on my blogs. That was the only bit of the dashboard I ever found useful and you’ve shoved it away at the bottom. I don’t use tags, I use categories, so I want the category module somewhere I can get to it without scrolling. There’s all this empty space above the fold. They really hate 1078×768, don’t they?

(Actually, this is my sister’s preferred rez, I just can’t be bothered to change it every time I log on. I think from now on I’m going to have to.)

Thank the lord, for the forty-seven millionth time, for Scribefire, which will save me having to deal with this ridiculous post page ever again.

Obviously the forums are overrun with people saying DO NOT WANT, which was to be expected as the target audience here isn’t especially techy and they don’t appreciate having to learn how to use their blogs all over again:

No learning the new dashboard is not like riding a bike. It’s more like now that I’ve learned how to ride a bike, you’ve taken the bike away and giving me stilts.

Not to mention the broken stuff. Nobody appreciates broken stuff. I’m so glad I tweaked my widgets yesterday as naturally the widget interface is broken big-time, along with image uploads. At least it gives the forums a respite from made-up penguin drama.

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.

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.)