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…….”
A Totally Tubular WordPress Theme
I am very happy to announce that the Tubular 1.0 theme is now available.
This theme was developed as a video theme, with the ability to also maintain a static website and blog. The homepage is built to display featured videos, while the integrity of a blog, widgeted sidebars and threaded comments remains.
Here’s a screenshot of how the homepage looks:
Here’s a screenshot of how the blog posts look:
Snow’s Up Dude
After picking up the pieces of my server crash, I have to admit that this week has been much better. So far so good with the server, and there are a lot of exciting things coming up!
Tomorrow morning I’ll be heading out of town for a few days, for a MUCH needed vacation. I’m very excited to say that I’m heading to Taos, New Mexico with one my best friends Cory Miller to rip up the Rocky Mountains.
Yes, we are going without wives or children, so it’ll be the boys and the mountain. (Contrary to popular belief, I actually do have a life outside of private messaging, emailing, blogging, developing, designing, supporting, marketing, brainstorming, updating, releasing and so on…)
Anyway, aside from being gone, I wanted to share with you something VERY cool with the way I am updating my themes. Many of you know that currently my homepages are setup by category calls, and the current structure means that to configure them, you need to go into the home.php files and change cat=1 to the category ID you want to display.
This poses two problems – it forces users who aren’t code-friendly to go into theme files, and that makes people nervous. It also means that people have to figure out what category IDs are, where they are located and how they can change the code by themselves.
So, without further adieu, I am providing a screenshot below of how upcoming themes will look (actually the Chrome theme now has this) and the ability to configure the homepage with the ease of this:
The other point of this post, is to share with you my desire to widgetize as much as possible. One question you might have after seeing the new theme options page, is “Where did all of the YouTube, AdSense, Feedburner, etc go?”
Well the bad news is that I have done away with configuring those things on the theme options page. The good news is that everything now will run using text widgets, as in my opinion, this gives users more flexibility in how they configure the theme.
As you can see from the screenshot provided, all areas that currently held a theme options page requirement can now be configured using widgets.
What is the bottom line?
Well, I’ll admit that I am a compulsive refiner by nature – and that’s a good thing, because it makes me continually work on (and make better) the themes that I develop. It’s my intent to make them as user-friendly as possible, so that both WordPress newbies as well as developers can use them.
Anyhow, I’ll be gone for a few days, and will be back Saturday night. So if it takes me some time to get back to you, that is why! (and I’ll try to snag some pics with the iPhone along the way to post updates!)
Introducing StudioPress: Online Business Solutions
I am very proud to announce the launching of my professional website, StudioPress – online business solutions using WordPress. This is something that I have needed to do for quite some time, and am glad that I finally was able to develop it.
In short, StudioPress is going to be my official web design, WordPress services and consultancy website – a place where I can be hired.
StudioPress will be the parent company for all that I do online, which means ultimately Revolution will fall underneath it as a web property that I own/run.
One thing I will say is that I have a lot of plans moving forward, both with Revolution and other things in general, and needed an umbrella to keep it all under. For a number of reasons, I was advised to do this. (aren’t lawyers and accountants great?)
Looking back over the past year, I have realized that I am running Revolution all by myself – true, I have some forum moderators, but the bottom line is that in order to continue developing professional themes, building an ever-growing community of users and ensuring quality documentation, it was best to build a company in which I can hire people to help do things.
After all, I’m only a one man show at this point, and you would all be surprised by the amount of work that running a WordPress theme website entails. (not to mention the 100’s of emails and private messages I get on a daily basis)
With the possibility of speaking at conferences and upcoming WordCamps, I needed to grow – and growing means not just doing more as an individual, but inviting important people who have proven themselves to join me. With the possibility that Revolution will be run on an incredibly popular website in the near future, (sorry no hints yet) my life might become insanely busier.
Thus, the launching of StudioPress…
