My Take on the WordPress Themes & the GPL License
There’s a huge hype these days around WordPress and the (infamous?) GPL license. Out of the “big guys”, first Brian Gardner of StudioPress (ex-Revolution) decided to distribute his themes as GPL. Later, iThemes followed, and now it’s time for WooThemes to adopt the license.
The discussion around this always seems to evolve into “open source” versus “author protection”. As Alex King pointed out in one of his posts, theme authors should be aware of what the GPL license exposes them too, while it provides freedom for basically everyone else.
I’m not by any means against freedom and open source. I’ve been preaching about the power of WordPress and the wonder that it is, but what I love more is to see a protection system for those authors that make a living out of releasing quality themes and plugins for WordPress. Somewhere along the way, in our quest for “freedom” we forgot how hard it is to earn our living, how hard it is to learn the things we now use to feed our families.
With all the respect I have for Brian, Adii and Alex who have been more than an inspiration for so many people and their contributions to the world of WordPress changed our lives, I fail to see how this sudden change of heart (or maybe “dictated” by Matt Mullenweg’s recent reactions) will help other developers.
The problem does not reside in the GPL license, but rather in the fact that by using WordPress you have to also release your “products” under this license. In theory the GPL license is an amazing thing that allows people to improve and build upon other people’s work, and thus contributing to the development of a bigger, better product, free or paid.
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A Look Into the WordPress Themes’ Options Pages
For a long while the option panels where something that people could only find in premium (commercial) themes, and for a good reason. The pricing of their licenses allowed the premium theme developers to invest more time in giving theme users the ways to do through these panels what they could not do through coding.
With the buzz created around these themes, regular users became aware of what could really be achieved, and thus, those that could not afford the license of a premium theme, became more selective with the free ones. A good-looking theme was not enough anymore, and WordPress developers realized it.
A good premium theme would bring its developer not only a good amount of money, but also recognition in the community, and this is where the free theme developers scored their biggest points. Now that their “turf” was endangered they had to react, and they did. For premium themes like Thesis or WP Unlimited, users have now alternatives like Thematic, Hybrid, Carrington, WP Framework or my own (even if not a framework) Simple Balance.
Why should free theme developers consider adding an options page?
Because being “cool” is just not enough anymore. Theme developers need to learn how to be useful. Free stuff can be either useless and ignored or useful and praised. I’m yet to see the developer offering a free theme without gaining something from it, be it awareness, expertise, backlinks, donation money, you name it! But none of these are achieved through an uncompetitive – even if free – product.
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Need help with Simple Balance? Ask away!
In the months past I’ve received a lot of messages, comments and emails, each asking something about Simple Balance. To some I have answered, to others I couldn’t, due to various reasons (mostly time).
Please understand that the simple fact that I released this theme for free is a “support” action itself, and most times, my daily activities do not allow me to help everybody in their quest to customize this theme the way they want to. That would mean to cut time from my clients’ projects to offer support for this free theme. I am sure that you can understand this situation.
That’s why, for a limited period of time, I’ll check out this post daily and try to answer any question you might have, be it design or source code related, as long as it is about Simple Balance. If you have previously asked the same thing on another topic, or sent a mail and did not get an answer, please ask again here so that I can answer your questions.
So… fire away!
PS: Some questions could already be answered in these posts:
Thesis 1.5 – A Premium Theme Worth Every Penny
Let me start off by saying that I’m not easily impressed by the huge number of “premium WordPress themes” out there. Sure, some of them are really good looking, but in terms of customization, most lack that something that would make me say: “OK, this one I can easily adjust to my needs!”
It seems that almost every premium theme out there focuses to much on delivering a top-notch design, that would make it hard to non design-savvy people to tweak to their own liking. This is where the new Thesis 1.5 theme makes a huge difference.
Click here to read the full blog post!
Free WordPress Themes Watch: Empty Canvas
My friend Adrian Diaconescu has released a new free WordPress theme called Empty Canvas. Those familiar with his previous theme, Corporate Sandbox will observe the similarities between these two themes, but as Adrian says: “[...] don’t download this theme and expect the Mona Lisa. It’s only a simple theme, that does wonders for me.”
Click here to read the full blog post!
10 Beautiful Non-Blog Websites Powered by WordPress
The time when WordPress was used strictly as a blog platform is long gone. WordPress has evolved into a mature CMS that gives designers and developers the right tools to create amazing non-blog websites for their clients. As proof for that stand these 10 beautiful websites powered by WordPress.
FernWoodCoffee.com
Herout-Caves.com
Things You Can Do To Help WordPress Developers
Today I’ve exchanged a few emails with one of Simple Balance’s users which made me think about several things that users could do to help out WordPress themes and plugins developers.
This article is written purely for the purpose of giving you an idea on how to give back to those that invest time and knowledge to give your free quality WordPress resources.
So, here are a few things you can do to help them out:
Offer to test out their themes and plugins
If their project is still in Beta stage, ask to join the testing group or register we’re this is permitted. Test out the product in whatever environment you have available and report bugs and unusual behavior to the designer / developer. They are only humans and most of the time work on too many project and might miss out things, being so closely involved in the project. An outsider could observe things that they can not.
You can also test the projects after the official release. Help is welcome anytime.
Click here to read the full blog post!
Simple Balance – Right Sidebar Alignment Bug Fix
It has been brought to my attention that the Simple Balance theme has a display bug which causes the right sidebar to drop below the content on single post pages.
After looking into this problem I’ve seen that this only happens when users are required to be logged-in in order to post a comment.
The bug is fairly easy to fix and a fix has already been included in the Simple Balance 2.2 download package.
In order to apply the fix, you only need to download the package and replace the “comments.php” file in your theme’s folder with the one inside the package.
Manual bug fix
Alternatively, you can apply the fix manually by opening the “comments.php” file in a text editor and scroll down to the end of the file where you should see this code snippet:
</form> </div> <?php endif; // If registration required and not logged in ?> <?php endif; // if you delete this the sky will fall on your head ?> </div>
All you need to do is to replace the above lines of code with the ones below:
</form> <?php endif; // If registration required and not logged in ?> </div> <?php endif; // if you delete this the sky will fall on your head ?> </div>
The closing tag of the comments section should have been placed outside the conditional loop that checks if the user is logged in. Since it was not, the sidebar was considered to be part of the comments area and displayed below.
Sorry for the inconvenience if you have had trouble because of this bug. Now it should be alright.
Simple Balance WP Theme in German
Thanks to the amazing involvement of Florian from Floeschen.ch, the Simple Balance theme has been translated to German, from front-end to the extensive control panel.
As Florian and I have agreed, the translated version will only be available from his blog and is to be considered the only official German release. Otherwise we could not guarantee for the safety of the scripts.
All future updates of Simple Balance will also be translated by Florian and released by him on the same page that the current version is available from.
Here’s the link: Simple Balance WP Theme auf Deutsch
Thank you Florian for the hard work!
Free WordPress Themes Watch: Too Newsy
Although not a day goes by without someone putting out there another WordPress theme, days like this one, when I see one theme that truly impresses me, don’t come that often. On January 26th, Performancing.com, in collaboration with Sophia Lucero, launched the “Too Newsy” free WordPress theme, and this is one theme you should definitely check out.
Click here to read the full blog post!
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