WordPress 3 Coming Together

Posted on February 22, 2010 by Lloyd

The delirious pace of WordPress 3 development has been delicious!

I’ve enjoyed not being able to keep up at all.

The sprint is on to feature freeze!

There’s going to be a patch sprint of sorts for 3.0 this week. Please grab a ticket, triage, patch or test:http://core.trac.wordpress.org/report/32. The feature freeze is March 1, so everything still on that report in 7 days from now will be punted to a future release.

There are a few incomplete tasks out there that need to get done to finish implementing new features (both small ones on that report, and the major 3.0 features). If you’re interested in helping but aren’t sure where you can, venture over to #wordpress-dev.

Andrew Nacin on wpdevel, Feb 22th, 2010

Jane Wells puts up a “Patches Welcome” sign on a “a handful of small UI enhancement tickets that are low priority for the hardcore devs, but that I’d still like to see make it into 3.0.” Jane will “try to post a couple of pet tickets each day throughout the sprint week that is coming up.”

Better, stronger, faster blog network creation and management will be huge!

Mostly I can’t wait for the twenty ten theme, and the slow death of the (poorly) justified text that may have been the Kubrick themes only shortcoming.

PS. Emphasis above and below (bold) is all mine.

PPS. WordPress 3 will look so good in the title of the next technical book you write

Wednesday, Feb 23, 2010 Update: Jane has posted “Menus, the Merge, and a Patch Sprint!“ with details on the WordPress Development Blog, including the tidbit that WordPress 3 will have much improved menu management.

Versatile and Elegant, WordPress, Democratizing Publishing

Posted on January 8, 2010 by Lloyd

The combination of the elegant and versatile WordPress and the ground breaking Kubrick made that possible, turning the democratization of publishing from an idealized concept into a concrete reality.
Tina Daunt, “The Secret History of Kubrick, the Blog Theme That Changed the Internet“, Huffington Post, Jan 8th, 2010

Commercial WordPress Themes’s PHP Code is GPL 2 Too

Posted on July 3, 2009 by Lloyd

I’m hoping that my boss Matt Mullenweg sharing the legal opinion on “Themes are GPL, too” will put the issue to rest for the majority of the community (emphasis mime):

“PHP in WordPress themes must be GPL, artwork and CSS may be but are not required.
…
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. To celebrate a few folks creating 100% GPL themes and providing support and other services around them, we have a new page listing GPL commercially supported themes.”

The legal opinion was provided by Software Freedom Law Center. Council James Vasile provided the findings and blogs at hackervisions.org . James also has posted about this on his own blog in the article “CMS Themes and the GPL“. As I commented there, my fear is:

“people read what they want to get out of it, and case law is the only thing that moves them.”

The legal finding and unchanged policy are consistent with the intentions of the WordPress developer community and what has been promoted for the four years I’ve been involved.

Talking about licensing really is the suck. Matt’s article became necessary lately as some commercial theme developers have been very aggressive to WordPress community members, who have shared theme code as allowed by WordPress’s viral GPL v2 license.

It frustrates me when I read commercial theme developers complaining about people “stealing” their themes after the thousands of hours they have worked. They make no mention of the hundreds of thousands of hours others have worked on WordPress (counting on the GPL protecting their freedoms ).

The incredibly exciting news is seeing the various commercially developed and supported themes embrace the GPL in the last 9 months. Theme collections like ThemeShaper (Thematic FrameWork), StudioPress (previously Revolution 2), and WooThemes are all 100% GPL — those are just the ones I’m familar with, be sure to check out the theme offerings of the other commercially supported GPL themes.

Broken WordPress Plugin or Theme, Blame Me

Posted on August 26, 2008 by Lloyd

WordPress community superstar and regular web tools collection contributor Jeff Chandler (jeffr0) recently published a passionate article, “Stop Blaming The WordPress Team“. The article is about plugin developers blaming WordPress for too frequent updates without testing of popular plugins. His conclusion ends “So the next time you upgrade WordPress and realize your favorite plugin is broke, don’t blame the WordPress team, blame the source.” There are almost 200 comments on the article, and reading through them I imagine almost all perspectives are represented.

My hope is you don’t blame anyone. Maybe, it’s the core WordPress developers fault, maybe it’s the plugin or theme’s author, but that matters much less than everyone involved staying positively pumped.

The worse possible outcome is plugin developer and theme designer exhaustion. These people are as much the WordPress team as anyone is!

Thank contributors. For many that is all the compensation they are looking for, but don’t berate the contributor that is looking for more.

The blame game doesn’t help. Instead, if the plugins or themes you use are a gift to you (free), blog about, comment on forums, write the authors directly thanking them for the work that you miss because it isn’t working with the newest version of WordPress. Why wait till there is a problem, thank them today.

If you really need to blame someone, blame me. I can take it.

Read the Prologue, Looking to Twitter to Continue the Dialogue

Posted on March 31, 2008 by Lloyd

Everyday it seems I get an email saying that someone is following me on Twitter. I’ve resisted using any of Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, and Facebook status tools… much.

Now, I’m taking another look. Why? Because of the WordPress Prologue Theme.

Continue reading →

Open Source Free Web Site Templates without the Open Source

Posted on February 8, 2008 by Lloyd

http://www.OSWD.org/ – “Open Source Web Design” led by Francis J. Skettino. Free web design templates.

Unfortunately, I like open source in my open source.