WordPress, StudioPress, The GPL License (Let’s Move On)
For those of you who have been working with WordPress for a while, you’re probably pretty tired (admittedly like me) about the whole conversation regarding the GPL license and how it applies (or doesn’t apply) to premium commercially supported theme developers.
I guess today can be considered “National Declaration of what Matt, WordPress et all thinks about it Day”. You can read all about the legality of the GPL license and how WordPress themes are affected by it. For those lazy folk, here’s the meat:
PHP in WordPress themes must be GPL, artwork and CSS may be but are not required.
There you have it.
It seems that even before the posting of the response that Matt was given from the Software Freedom Law Center, other developers such as iThemes and WooThemes had already decided it was wise to move their licenses over to the GPL.
And as Matt puts it, WordPress has chosen to celebrate those who are developing GPL themes with a brand new Commercially Supported WordPress Theme page. Which, of course is a follow through to a promise that Matt made nearly a year ago.
This also clearly illustrates Matt’s view that people can (and will be endorsed if they do it with the GPL License) make money using WordPress.
Remember the WordPress Titans
It’s been a long time since I’ve really put any deep thought into a post here on my blog, but today I’m feeling the love, and wanted to spread it around. I apologize in advance if this post causes you to grab a tissue, I just couldn’t refuse to write it.
For those of you who follow me on Twitter this won’t come as a surprise to you – but for those who don’t, this morning I discovered a major premium theme affiliate program fraud ring. I hate to say that it’s been happening for months – I won’t go into all of the details regarding the situation, but what I can say is that I’m glad I found it. This really isn’t the reason why I’m writing the post, so please let’s keep any discussion to what you read below.
Within seconds after realizing what was going on, my reaction wasn’t to contact my wife, my son, my parents or any of my local friends – I contacted a few other people first.
It was Cory from iThemes, Jason from Press75, Adii from Woo Themes and Brian & Chris from Thesis.
While chatting with Jason this morning about the ordeal, we started talking about feeling the “WordPress love” we have for each other, and that inspired this tweet of mine:
True community amongst WordPress theme competitors isn’t cut throat – it’s sharing the wealth of info even if it helps out the “other guy”.
You might think my reaction towards the discovery of the fraud ring and how my instinct to immediately contact my competitors as being strange, but I don’t. And I truly believe that if any of the others listed above found the same thing I did, they’d be contacting me too.
That’s just how it goes… and although we might disagree with certain things or choose different business models (although not so much anymore) we have a mutual respect for each other that I think is pretty awesome. I think it shows quite a bit, because I’ve seen a number of times other folks seen as leaders in the WordPress community compliment each other on Twitter, jump to the defense of each other when we’re being attacked, and so on.
One of my favorite movies of all time is Remember the Titans – the true story of a newly appointed African-American coach and his high school team on their first season as a racially integrated unit.
Even though the premium theme designers in the WordPress community aren’t racially integrated, there’s a part in that movie that I can’t help but think as being relevant to the way I feel about the 5 guys I mentioned above.
It’s about leadership – in Remember the Titans it was referring to the team. In our world, it’s referring to the WordPress community as a whole. We are seen by many as leaders, and I find it vitally important we take that seriously. We can be in it for ourselves, or for our team.
To my friends Cory, Jason, Adii, Brian and Chris: “Strong side, left side…….”
Magazine Theme – Thoughts So Far?
I want to thank all of you who left a comment on my post Revolution Magazine Theme – Bring It Back? I was on vacation last week and unfortunately couldn’t reply to them all, but I did read them.
Anyway, I won’t waste any time – I’ve started development of the Magazine theme by StudioPress, and am looking for feedback. Take it for a test drive, and let me know what you think.
Here’s a screenshot of the homepage so far, note that the tabber section is back:
Here’s a screenshot of the theme options page so far:
Revolution Magazine Theme – Bring It Back?
Please do me a favor and read this post in it’s entirety before leaving a comment. I wanted to ask a question to anyone who has purchased the original Revolution Magazine theme – would you have a problem if I updated/restyled the theme and brought it back onto the StudioPress site?
Now bear with me, as I promised before – I would not release the theme as it was originally designed to protect the integrity of the circumstances in which is was purchased. However, what I am proposing is to take the original theme, updated it (again) for WordPress 2.8 and restyle it so that the appearance varies from the original one.
The theme package would be made freely available to anyone who purchased the original theme at no cost. My plan is to have the theme updated for WordPress 2.8, thoroughly optimized by Joost de Valk (as all StudioPress themes will be), updated for auto-thumbnails with the TimThumb script, provide additional page templates, localized for translation for any language and then supported on the StudioPress site.
Before making any decisions, I wanted to get general feedback (both from those who purchased and anyone else with an opinion) on this. I value the WordPress community, which is why I’m asking.
Here’s a screenshot of the orginal theme for your reference:
Joost de Valk Joins StudioPress Development Team
I am very happy to announce that Joost de Valk (complete and total WordPress ninja) will be joining the StudioPress development team. Joost, most known for his GPL plugin and development work with WordPress, brings an incredible amount of SEO and marketing knowledge to our team.
Together we will be updating the current themes to optimize them even more for search engine optimization as well as code efficiency. We will also be preparing all StudioPress themes for internationalization. The upcoming Education theme will be the first theme to include these features.
I am personally very happy to be teaming up with a fellow GPL developer, and we have a lot of awesome things that will become a part of the StudioPress themes. Welcome Joost, to our team!
