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.

It’s really unfortunate that BrowseHappy keeps getting hacked in this way, isn’t it? I suppose its artifically enhanced pagerank, along with its neglected state, makes it an easy and attractive target for spammers. It’s lucky that other people are keeping an eye on it, or those juicy little PR8 links would be hanging around indefinitely. And that would never do.

Maybe Matt should consider moving it to a more secure server. Or switch it to a secure CMS. Or get rid of the frickin’ spamlinks to his outdated little hobbysite altogether, except of course said domain wouldn’t then be worth nearly as much should he ever decide to sell it on to a browser manufacturer of his choosing. (Bubbles burst, you know; got to have a few insurance policies in place.)

If you don’t have time to maintain the domain, quit squatting it and hand it over to Mozilla already. That would be the beautiful, self-sacrificing, open-source thing to do. You could even write a beautiful, self-sacrificing post on ma.tt and the dead blog about it. I can hear the faraway echo of fanboys cheering already.

Isn’t it strange how when you write an article slagging off TypePad and praising WordPress you are inevitably ‘honest’ and ‘insightful’, ‘interesting’ and ‘eloquent’, and when somebody from Six Apart tries to make a counterargument they are ‘venomous’ and guilty of ‘falsehoods and misdirection’?

Sadly, my comment on Lloyd’s post is still languishing in moderation. I’m sure this is merely an oversight, since nobody would tell their readers ‘Please challenge me on my views!’ if they were going to censor dissenting comments. I’ll reproduce it here for now, and link to it when it’s published:

I don’t see that Anil’s any more abrasive in his defence than Matt is when people come out attacking WordPress. (That is, possibly a little too forthright, but hey, fanboys are annoying.)

For someone with ‘extensive experience of both platforms’, Michael seemed strangely confused about the distinction between wordpress.com and .org and TypePad and MT, attempting to draw direct comparisons between Automattic’s non-hosted software and Six Apart’s hosted service when it suited him, and switching back to comparing TypePad with wordpress.com when that fitted his argument better.

For example: he thinks TypePad makes it too difficult for people to add third-party widgets, conveniently forgetting that wordpress.com doesn’t let you add any third-party flash or javascript widgets at all. But he thinks it’s cool that wordpress.com won’t let you use Adsense, conveniently forgetting that wordpress.org has dozens of plugins which make it easy.

I’m afraid that by the point where he claimed the separation of WordPress and WordPress MU was ‘a different developmental strategy’ rather than a historical accident I’d lost all patience. WordPress MU isn’t a fork of WordPress; it’s a fellow fork of b2 that got swallowed up by its sibling. Incorporating multiblogs into core would have broken backward compatibility so much it was no longer an option. And it’s not for people who need to run a handful of blogs off a single installation, it’s a specialist tool for site admins who need a blogfarm. It would make more sense to assess it alongside the Livejournal open source code than to pit it against Movable Type. http://mu.wordpress.org makes this perfectly clear, but proselytising fanboys trying to push it as ‘the upgrade to the upgrade’ don’t do anyone any favours.

I left out how he’s praising the 2.5 interface when Matt has already pretty much acknowledged it was a failure. Or how he thinks monthly security upgrades are cool because they’re a ‘a testament to a vibrant developer community’, which comment alone constitutes the loopiest piece of fanboying since ‘the blogging market is c.l.o.s.e.d.’

But no. Mocking the fanboy is a cheap distraction. My point is how nasty things are getting now the market is contracting. I’m not talking about the consumer market so much; people are still starting new blogs, though in the current economic climate they’re going to be less willing to spend money on them and that’s not good for either company. I’m talking about getting more funding, or going public, or finding a parent company willing to take you under its wing and shield you from the hard times ahead. These things are not going to be as easy as they were a couple of years ago. You are competing for increasingly scarce resources. It’s easy to be nice to each other when things are going well, but these days it’s survival of the fittest, and the way these spats are conducted both sides seem about equally worried.

Which would be odd, if Six Apart really were the underdog; but they’ve stolen a march on Automattic by making their anti-spam service free to everyone. Short-term this shouldn’t make too much difference as most paid-up subscribers won’t be interested in switching till they’ve got their money’s worth, but long-term it threatens one of Automattic’s major revenue streams. That’s the real reason the gloves are off again.

And the accusations of being splog-ridden have evidently hit home because they’re, um, true. How could they not be? Akismet can’t hope to catch them all at sign-up and you’re relying wholly on volunteers to report the ones they happen to see. Plus, all reports have to be dealt with individually by support staff, who are generally sort of busy with support. At least they’ve blocked drmike’s wordpress.com account now so they won’t be getting any more of those pesky spam reports from him. That should help with the workload even if it doesn’t help with the splog situation.

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.

[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.

Here we have a guy taking his crusade against Litespeed to the .org forums. (Litespeed is the server software the official WP sites use instead of Apache; it’s recommended on their requirements page and Codex.)

LiteSpeed is not only a commercial product, but it’s closed source and most likely includes code from LightTPD and / or NGINX which are free. WordPress is already benefitting this commercial venture being the posterboy for LiteSpeed, which has very expensive licensing (they charge $250 PER CORE in your server, a dual opteron 280 would cost you $1,000) and they also delve in censorship with a policy that bans its use for legal adult content (I wonder how come WordPress.com runs LiteSpeed, when it’s chock full of adult content to the point of being banned in Turkey?).

Couple of points:

• I don’t know how many people are running around with the misapprehension that wordpress.com is blocked in Turkey because of adult content, but that really can’t be good for the brand.
• Yes, in an ideal world WP would use only free open source software, but in the real world Automattic are a business and they have to go with what works best. If the free open source tools won’t cut it, then they can’t use them. Some of us wish they had taken this more pragmatic approach years ago when it came to picking forum software. Or wordpress.com themes. Still, better late than never.
• Of course, not being GPL means you can dictate who gets to use your code :
  

  You can not use the SOFTWARE for a Warez site or a Porn site. This includes sexual content, or direct links to adult content elsewhere. This is also true for sites that promote any illegal activity.

  Um, you think nobody on wordpress.com ever posts ’sexual content’ or links to porn sites? Why do we have a ‘mature’ tag then? Oh, right, it’s to keep the adult content hidden from Club Penguiners, Christians and LITESPEED!

• Clearly, this is bonkers. So yeah, can we please work on getting the free open source tools to cut it, because then you can go around being smug about only using OS stuff and you won’t have to pretend you don’t know about their loopy licencing requirements. Because if you’re profiting from someone else’s work it’s good manners to respect their wishes, whether those wishes are that you refrain from removing their credit link, or refrain from linking to porn sites, or refrain from using their code when they’ve specifically asked you not to. I know that the licensing requirements of third parties are of little concern to Automattic since if you’re not using GPL you are evil and deserve to be screwed (and if you are using GPL, you have already issued them with permission to screw you), but I can’t help thinking that one day this cavalier attitude towards other people’s terms of use is going to end up backfiring.

[kudos for this story goes to adam. I don't spend anything like enough time in the .org forums to pick these things up myself.]

If these themes are going to be GPL and free to .org users, they’re not charging for the theme. They’re charging for the ability to use the theme on your wordpress.com blog. In the case of CSS-only themes, people can already do this if they pay $15 for the custom CSS upgrade.

So anyone who wants to charge $15 or over for a CSS-only theme ought to be excluded from the program right now. Because either they don’t know anything about wordpress.com, or they’re trying to profit from the naivete of .com users, and in both cases we can really do without their contribution.

It gets worse. If I buy custom CSS I can have as many unique themes as I like for one flat rate. If I buy hypothetical premium theme I just get one. What if it turns out not to look so hot with my box.net widget? What if my readers complain the contrast on the text isn’t high enough? Do I get a refund? Do I get the ability to edit it? What if I switch themes and decide I want my premium theme back? Do I have to buy it all over again?

Maybe we should put the bar at $10? But then, is the convenience of having the theme installed for you really worth even that much? As Mark points out, most bloggers, even the clueless ones that Matt is targeting, have mastered the intricacies of copy/paste. A fair number can even upload their own images (fancy!).

There’s more. How many free themes do you think are going to get added to wordpress.com once this starts up? I mean, we’re not exactly snowed under at the moment. Free users will end up stuck with the same old ageing themes they’ve seen a million times before on a million other blogs. People who are actually part of wordpress.com, as opposed to outsiders wanting to make a quick buck out of the clueless people*, will want fresh new themes to be available to as many people as possible.

They’ll probably use their shady credits system to make it impossible to set prices below a dollar. I might be able to live with a dollar. I don’t like the idea of 50c of that going into Matt’s pocket, because people who run around turning down $200 million don’t need handouts, and I did vow never to give Automattic any cash ever again after they stole that $5 from me. But then who knows how many Adsense pennies they’ve made out of me already, by simple virtue of my continuing to blog here? And who knows what my bandwidth would cost, if I were paying for it? And it’s not as if I particularly want the 50c for myself. Exchange rates the way they are, it wouldn’t buy me a packet of crisps. Besides, every time I try to make money out of designing, the joy goes out of it. It turns into work.

Do you see how once you drop your asking price to the absolute minimum, the 50/50 split becomes slightly less painful? And how things are fairer for the end users, who get a wider choice of themes and aren’t screwed over quite as badly in the process?

The argument against this is that it devalues the work of the designers. I say that since .org users are getting it free anyway and you’re not even allowed to include a link to your portfolio, it’s already been devalued. If you genuinely think your theme is worth $50, then you’re not going to give it away for free. And if you don’t genuinely think your theme is worth $50 (which you clearly don’t, since you’re giving it away for free) then it’s not particularly ethical to try and sell it for that amount. This applies equally to designers and their Automattic overlords, by the way. And please don’t say ‘it’s worth whatever people are willing to pay for it’. Ripping people off is not rendered morally acceptable by the victim’s willingness to be ripped off.

Anyway, this is all highly academic. How long has the Adsense upgrade been promised? How long has themes.wordpress.net been dead? How long was domain mapping ‘coming soon’? Exactly. I don’t know why we’re all getting so worked up.

Basically, Matt wants everyone to sell him GPL stylesheets to use on wordpress.com and wp.org/extend/themes

I know. Why don’t you just support the CSS upgrade properly (i.e. take a few less months getting Sandbox up to date, stop telling people they need to be experts to buy it, maybe even provide a couple of nice copy/paste stylesheets to get them started) and build your market around that? Except, oh yeah, the people who are already producing CSS-based themes for wordpress.com (and not charging, since a) they just want to make the place a little less homogenous and b) it would get them ToSed) are evidently not the calibre you want to work with.

Basically, you just threw ntuat.wordpress.com down the drain. Nothing there is going to be eligible for inclusion because it’s not brand-new and I’m not a professional. (Some of it’s not even mine, they’re ports of third-party GPL themes that were either requested or which I felt filled a gap in the existing selection.) People are going to be even less interested in buying custom CSS if they can pay the same price and get an official theme that doesn’t need to be copy/pasted. Assuming that custom CSS is still available, of course, rather than having been removed because people are using it to rip off all these killer premium themes.

I do what the almighty Matt commands — I design stuff that is free as in both speech and as in beer, that requires people to give him money in order to use — and I still get slapped in the face. But that’s OK. I’m collateral damage. Ultimately this will be a really great way to screw more money out of naive .com users of giving people more options about how they want their blog to look. And when this fabled marketplace is opened to people outside Matt’s circle of friends, I may even chuck some skins in there at a few cents each. Because honestly? Seeing as how it’s GPL and the styles will be free for .org users, I would feel like a complete shill charging any more than a nominal amount.

Because it’s not even worth trying to post comments on the news blog these days:

The screenshot makes me want to cry. And when I find the demo, I discover it is yet another Kubrick mod that doesn’t even bother changing the stupid little pseudobullets. I thought we got past this phase two years ago, and everyone had realised by now that spending five minutes doing find/replace on hex codes does not constitute good design?

Meanwhile, if you want to use any of the Sandbox style contest entries (you know, like new skins? from this summer?), you need to pay for the CSS upgrade, download the skin yourself, and backport it to 0.61, because in spite of their unimpeachable GPLness none of them meet Automattic’s high standards. (Well, Blueberry made it to SVN. So near, so far.)