it is what it is

Even though graphics and CSS aren’t required to be GPL legally, the lack thereof is pretty limiting. Can you imagine WordPress without any CSS or javascript? So as before, we will only promote and host things on WordPress.org that are 100% GPL or compatible. .

Wow. Disingenuous, much? Your internet lawyers just admitted that the only elements of a theme covered by GPL are the PHP files, but you’re going to go ahead and insist on everything else being GPL anyway.

(What happens, by the way, if I give all the WP functions their own files within the theme, separating them from the html and calling them with a common-or-garden php include? Would index.php catch GPL merely by virtue of calling files that calls WP functions? OK, so nobody in their right mind is going to attempt this, but still.)

Actually this is pretty reassuring for anyone still clinging on to CC — they can protect their CSS and images if they choose to do so, freeing them to use third-party CC content such as icons, photos, brushes or backgrounds. HTML generally isn’t special enough to be worth protecting anyway. They can’t submit the resulting themes to wordpress.org — Automattic don’t have the resources to moderate them — but nobody really suffers from that apart from users who are too lazy to look beyond its heavily limited selection; it’s not like there’s a shortage of alternative directories.

Meanwhile, I feel vaguely sorry for the saps who bought multi-use licences for hundreds of dollars from the various premium theme developers, only to discover within months (or weeks, or even days) that those who only bought a single-use package are now getting exactly the same deal, and that anyone who downloaded a pirate copy for nothing has officially done nothing wrong. But they don’t seem to be complaining too much (or maybe their comments are being censored, or maybe they’re too ashamed to admit to their stupidity in public, who knows?)

I can see that the developers were pushed into a corner here; you can’t risk being ostracised by the company who own your platform, because without official backing people won’t trust you enough to do business with you. It was OK while everyone was in the wilderness together, but as soon as one sucked it up and toed the GPL line they all had to, or he was going to get the monopoly. If you make iPhone apps you’re at the mercy of Apple, if you build a business around wordpress themes you’re at the mercy of Automattic. It’s just the price you have to pay. I still don’t believe that the GPL was conceived with the intention of being used to protect the interests of big corporations and manipulate the little guys, but it is what it is.

hating on netscape, those were the days

OK, who took their eye off the ball and let Matt post in the forums? You know he only ends up antagonising people.

Did anyone else look at the ‘acquisition’ of blo.gs and think of our old friend BrowseHappy, i.e. third party finds itself with domain it can’t be bothered to maintain and offloads it onto Matt so he can put backlinks on it? True, it’s only a PR6 at the moment — the site is so neglected it’s dissing Netscape 4 rather than IE — but that’s easily taken care of.

eta: turns out the stats issues were down to a code overhaul of which Matt was obviously unaware. Not in itself a problem — nobody expects him to be heavily involved in the day-to-day running of this place nowadays, any more than they expect him to read wp-hackers or write his own blog posts. The trouble is, when you post as staff that gives your answers the appearance of being authoritative, even when you have no more idea what’s going on than the average volunteer. I think that’s one reason why support staff prefer not to post on the forums if it can be avoided.

spinner

More proof, if proof were in fact needed, that ma.tt long ago ceased to be a proper blog and is now a corporate mouthpiece. (I’d have linked to the actual comment, but no, we can not has permalinks.)

wordpress.tv itself is, exactly as you would expect, a wordpress.com blog with a bunch of videos, aimed at getting Automattic a monopoly on video tutorials and driving its rival purveyors of ’spammy promotional videos’ out of business. (At the time of writing, wordpresstutorials.com is still top of Google for ‘wordpress video tutorials‘ — why else do you think Automattic are linking to this new blog so assiduously? Look at the wp.com version of the announcement and its eight links to the target site, it’s like SEO 101.)

Since I can read faster than most people can speak and am not a raving fanboy, I am not the target audience. Naturally, the only community-produced content is the wordcamp stuff (enough to keep the fanboys happy) and the instructional videos are all produced inhouse so there’s no risk of anyone promoting any themes or plugins that aren’t. I don’t know how much they’ll make out of the Adsense on this one but as many of the users will be totally new to WP and looking for all the information they can find on the topic, I imagine it will be quite the moneyspinner.

here we go again

Late to this one (Christmas shopping, meh), but, yeah, if you didn’t already hear, Matt has, unilaterally and without prior notice, purged extend/themes of over a quarter of its content. As well as targeting premium theme sites, this allegedly includes any theme linking to a site which carries an affiliate link to WooThemes. Whether this ban also encompasses affiliate links to theme sites other than Adii’s, I do not know (though affiliate links to Revolution are presumably kosher, seeing as how wordpress.org was carrying one till they were called on it). How Joseph felt about his theme-vetting skills being publically dissed in such a way, I do not know. What the hell was going through Matt’s brain at the time, I also do not know, but it’s December again so we can’t go expecting too much in the way of rationality.

Somebody in the sacred inner circle really needs to point out to Matt that if he doesn’t let go of his obsession with persecuting theme designers it’s going to start seriously hurting the community. For a start, it should have been apparent to anyone with half a brain that premium themers were going to release freebies and submit them to wordpress.org as a promotional tool; partly for the linkage, partly to showcase their skills. If Matt didn’t want people doing that it should have been made clear at the outset.

Of course, there is no logical reason why he should not want them doing that. A GPL theme is a GPL theme, regardless of who designed it or the motives behind its release. And if it’s been made to persuade you to invest in the designer’s other work, it needs to be a decent one. Free themes by premium designers? What is so terrible about this, exactly? Nobody is forcing people to buy whatever other themes the designer or his/her affiliates has on offer. Nobody is even forcing anyone to keep the link to a profit-making site. The whole concept of GPL is that you can’t enforce these things, that it doesn’t much matter who originally created the code, and that you can take it and make of it what you will. Refusing to distribute a GPL theme (or plugin, for that matter) because you personally dislike what the developer has done with their website pretty much flies in the face of that spirit of openness. The code is rejected because of who made it, rather than judged on its own merits; and end-users are deprived of a free theme.

(Still, let’s face it, it’s a very long time since anyone involved in this endless GPL jihad bothered to think about the poor bloody users.)

People stipulating that you can’t remove their links? Also to be expected by anyone with half a brain. I mean, Michael Heilemann tried that with Kubrick, and that was apparently GPL enough to make it into core. If designers can’t be bothered to ascertain what the licence you’re imposing upon them actually entails, that’s their lookout. My understanding was that in submitting your theme to .org you render your theme GPL, because that’s what you agreed to when you uploaded it. And at this point it ceases to matter what you want people to do (or not do) with your theme. If you still care about things like being credited for your work, and you don’t want your free labour commercially exploited, then the only way to clarify your terms of use is to CC-licence your content and keep the hell away from wordpress.org. Come to that, it would be prudent to steer clear of designing for WordPress entirely and focus your efforts upon a platform that allows you to distribute your work under whichever terms you see fit.

I fully expect that the next offensive will be to ban links to non-WordPress sites entirely, as was proposed for the abortive Marketplace. That could probably be handled on an automated level, and would prevent chucking the baby out with the bathwater and junking a perfectly good theme because of an iffy footer link. It would also prevent people from gaining any extra traffic or pagerank from designing a successful theme, not to mention preventing end users from following up on a theme they see on someone else’s blog. But then, SEO spamming is Serious Business and should be left to those with multiple PR8 and 9 sites at their disposal.

revolution in the head

Can we expect to see a wordpress.com version of Revolution, then? Because I’m trying to think of what inducements Matt might have offered Bryan to adopt the One True Path — other than access to extend/themes, linkjuice from ma.tt and the withdrawal of his severe disapproval, none of which I’m convinced would have been quite enough — and hiring him to design a wordpress.com theme or two would be quite a good one.

(Well, there’s also ‘join me on the moral high ground so we can spit on Adii people from a great height’, but, again, perhaps not quite compelling enough.)

I actually suspect this was a case of the stick rather than the carrot. It is, to say the least, quite a risky enterprise to try and build a business upon a platform when the owners of said platform are known to be hostile towards your business and given to murmuring about its questionable legality. It would probably only take a couple of WordCamp whispers about Matt talking to lawyers to scare you into toeing the party line.

slappage

Another day, another theme.

the bottom left bar is associated with your about page. Derek made it clear when designing the theme that he wanted that there.

Oh dear. Did nobody tell him that wordpress.com users don’t take kindly to being told what widget goes where? The kind of fine-grained control that professionals demand is a really, really bad fit with wordpress.com. You may know exactly what you want the sidebar to look like — search box at the top, categories below it, kewl javascripty thing — but your users are not necessarily going to share that view.

I seriously believe that before anyone designs a theme for wordpress.com they need to be sat down and forced to scroll through twenty random blogs, followed by a day or two on the forums. Then they will understand how people plan to mutilate their beautiful design with excessive numbers of pages with unfeasibly long titles, outsized widgets, crazy fonts pasted in from Word, video clips, photos the size of a bus and languages other than English. And, when they have finished sobbing, they will be able to take evasive action to make it slightly more difficult to break.

Meanwhile, yet another discussion on how it is, and will always be, evil in the eyes of the dictator to profiteer from designing for WordPress, wherein I challenge Matt to name his favourite GPL themes before belatedly realising that he is obviously referring to Prologue and Monotone. Like Matt would ever publically express admiration for a theme he wasn’t personally involved with.

Sometimes, still, I am so touchingly naive I am compelled to slap my forehead. Hard.

all your site are belong to kids

I observe that Matt is compensating for the loss of his beloved default blogroll by sneaking a link to his blog into the footer of wordpress.com:

Cute. He’s got couple of years at most before people cease to find his obsession with being #1 in Google endearing and start to think it sad (it is rather adolescent, after all), so he might as well optimise while the sun shines.

Also, they have done away with the stupid faux-blog design of the forums and made the fonts teeny-tiny to further discourage participation by anyone over the age of fourteen. Yay!

one-fingered salute

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.

answerable

I think we are all aware by now that Automattic are generally averse to having official policies on anything much, apart from affiliate links/adsense/spam/miscellaneous profiteering etc. being Teh Evil (unless they are doing it, in which case it is OK). Official policies, like, totally stifle your freedom to make the rules up as you go along. Hence, while having over a dozen tagegories on your posts probably will get you kicked out of the global ad tag pages and labelled a spammer, it’s ‘not a published rule‘ (in fact, the exact nature of the rule is a closely guarded secret) and the FAQ blithely insists there is no limit on the number of tags you can have. Who knows, one day Scoble might experience an urge to tagspam. It’s so much easier to change the rules if they’re obscure in the first place.

Inevitably, however, sometimes the freedom to invent policy on the hoof leads to staff inventing entirely different policies on the same thing without each other’s knowledge.

Last January, Mad at blog-well.com appealed for the ability to redirect traffic from their old wordpress.com blog to their new wordpress.org blog. Matt responded in comments with a workaround:

Did you try adding the domain to this blog, making it your primary URL, and then switching the DNS back to GoDaddy? It should redirect all visitors from blogwell.wordpress.com to the new domain on the new host, at least as long as you pay the 10/yr for parking.

Yay! Mad was very happy and grateful for this solution, as were several people who showed up later in the same comments thread. In response to the support issues arising from this thread, six months later Mad produced a PDF tutorial on how to make the move from .com to .org. Yay again.

Unfortunately, Matt appears to have neglected to tell his head of support that he has been promoting this feature, and when a year on from Mad’s how-to guide somebody shows up on the forums asking for clarification Mark censors the link to the tutorial, says it’s ‘unsupported’ and could stop at any time, then suggests that accounts caught doing it could be nuked. Raincoaster backs him up, having experience of seeing such blogs deleted.

Look, I know it can be hard for everyone to be on the same page because you’re all in different countries in different timezones doing different things, but your communication breakdowns should really not be the users’ problem. The original poster’s question was very simple: is it allowed, or is it not allowed? That should be answerable with ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Qualified ‘yes’ and ‘no’, perhaps, such as ‘you would need to have hosted your blog here for x amount of time’ or ‘you would have to have bought your domain through us’, or ‘only if you opt out of global tags’. Or even, if that would be too boring and straightforward to fit with the way you like to do things, the standard business-blog response of ‘contact support detailing your individual circumstances so a decision can be made’. But still, you know, some sort of reasoning other than the whim of whoever happens to be answering the question today. People who are promoting solutions given to them by your boss can be forgiven for thinking the solution is company-approved.

the faraway echo of fanboys cheering

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.