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.

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

“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.

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.

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

If you haven’t heard about Prologue, it’s WordPress theme that people are calling a twitter for groups, created by the Automattic team: Matt, Joseph, and MT. It is available on WordPress.com or you can download it for your own WordPress install.

I’ll admit I thought it was a lot of excitement over nothing, but my nay saying didn’t diminish Matt’s enthusiasm. Then he announced Prologue, and everyone was really excited about it! The titles of the articles are quite telling, here are a few:

• Twitter – Public Timeline = Prologue
• WordPress’s Prologue: part Twitter, part Basecamp, all business
• Prologue: Twitter for WordPress for Groups
• Will Prologue bring the Twitters back?
• Prologue/WordPress–Private Twitter II

Still I didn’t get it, until I really started to use it. Now, after using it these last couple of months did, I couldn’t live without our private Prologue for sharing with the Automattic team and even more important keeping up with what they are working on and ideas they are playing with. As MT describes it:

Prologue was designed for something different—easily setting up and sharing a dialogue within a fixed group. It puts aside the standard “behind the scenes” method of blogging and makes the act of posting part of the experience. It creates a kind of archived and searchable conversation, like an IM window that’s archived, taggable, and accessible from any web browser.

Every team or group needs a prologue to share tidbits of what you are working on, without the pressure. Is there a similar tool you use?

This is why I’m now turning to Twitter and family to see what use I can make of them.

Unfortunately, I like open source in my open source.

As a person who’s blog is in bad need of some design — any design — I noticed with interest Derek K. Miller’s article “Free open source web designs“:

OSWD is a bunch of open-source web designs, most of a bloggy style. There are more than 2000 of them so far, and you can contribute your own—at least if you have better web design skills than I do.

Looks like it has been around 5 years, and Francis suggests it “has grown to be the premier site on the internet for the sharing of web designs.” Of course, for my own evil purposes I want http://themes.wordpress.net/ to be the premier site for open source web designs, but I’m happy to find more great resources.

I was disappointed by what I found.

Immediately, I was struck by the irony of “using the OSWD design itself [...] is not allowed without written consent from OSWD”.

That page starts with “you can download any …”, but never talks about the real freedoms of open source:

Free Redistribution
Source Code
Derived Works

and so on, which are derive from the The Free Software Definition:

The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

“The designs distributed at OSWD each carry their own separate open source license which is chosen by the designer when it is submitted to the site.” Turns out I have to download a theme to find out the license. OK, that is a lacking experience (design), but I will give it a go.

I downloaded the top five most downloaded designs: RedTie by alexisc22, andreas01 by Andreas, Delicious Fruit by Dieter, Rounded_2 by jedignork, and FunkyCoolBlue by VirtualFunction. Not one of them including licensing information. The famous WordPress theme designer comes the closest with Andreas Viklund with at the top of andreas01.css:

andreas01 – an open source xhtml/css website layout by Andreas Viklund (http://andreasviklund.com). Made for OSWD.org, free to use as-is for any purpose as long as the proper credits are given for the original design work. For design assistance and support, contact me through my website or through http://oswd.org/email.phtml?user=Andreas

The other ones pretty much had nothing.

Lets look at another site, http://www.opensourcedesign.com – “Open Source Design”. That also sounds promising. Hmm, no way to add a theme. I flipped through quite a few and they all are Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 by FreeCSSTemplates.org. Creative Commons Attribution is a great license, but it will never be an open source license, because “you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor” (emphasis mine). By requiring attribution as the author specifies, you might affect the experience (the interface) of the resulting site. So no open source design in sight there either.

Now do you see why we are such a moody bunch? I better go see if I can help get http://themes.wordpress.net/ accepting submissions again.