• Houston is the hometown for Matt. He says “You are my people” to the crowd, on his keynote. See his complete keynote.
• Houston has so many WordPress enthusiasts, I could see more than 200 people with all kinds of different backgrounds.
• The event is very well organized.
• People loving WordPress also loves iPhones and iPads. This camp is the second place where I see so many iDevices, the first one is the Apple Store
• Had an opportunity to listen to the sessions of Bill Erickson and Aaron Brazell and learnt a few tricks and tips.
• The word “Thesis” brings a lot of laughter in the crowd just similar to someone mentioned “Apple” in Google’s Camp. While Aaron hates the Thesis theme, Thesis is used by a lot of people for building WordPress sites quickly and professionally.
• I met Stephanie Leary who wrote a book on WordPress 3 and she seems so knowledgeable.
• I met Cullen Wilson who is running a company called WPEngine, providing hosted WordPress solutions.
• Finally I met Matt, the founder of WordPress and we had a short conversation. See the pictures he took on that day.
• Matt recognized me by face, he said he has seen my picture on this website.
• Matt said MistyLook is one of his favorite themes and he has personally worked on getting it for use in wordpress.com. It is one of the most popular themes among the users of wordpress.com.
• I am happy and proud to be associated with WordPress in some way through my contributions.

Go Ahead and Upgrade…Enjoy!!!

What is WordPress?

WordPress is an open source software that is released to the public for free, under a GPL License.
People download this software, and install it on their hosting servers. The software helps people manage their website’s content and its ‘look and feel’.
I do strongly believe it is one of the most versatile and powerful CMS out there as of now.

What is a WordPress Theme?

A WordPress Theme, is a collection of PHP files, CSS stylesheets and images. These files are packaged into one zip file and is offered as one “WordPress Theme”.
A Theme basically defines the look and feel of a WordPress-Powered site.
In simple words, we could say that WordPress offers the bare bones of the website and a Theme offers the skin that covers the skeleton.
You can learn more about what is in a WordPress Theme at my other site.

How does it work?

People can download these WordPress Themes, from many of the websites.
They can then install the Theme to work with their WordPress installation. One website can have multiple WordPress Themes and people can pick and choose any of the Themes that they have installed.

Why I think a Theme need not inherit GPL License?

I am just trying to put my thoughts on this issue here. I do understand WordPress has been created and maintained by lots of hard working and passionate people at the Development team. I am not in any way trying to belittle any of their work.

1. Theme’s code is not written by WordPress Dev Team.

WordPress provides the hooks for the WordPress Themes. A Theme developer basically uses these hooks and presents the content in an elegant manner, through the theme.
WordPress comes with only two themes bundled with it. Those are called “WordPress Classic Theme” and “WordPress Default Theme”. If Matt wants to dictate what license a theme should be inheriting, he can only say it for these two themes or any themes that inherits from these two themes.

2. A Theme is not released as one package bundled with WordPress.

If someone releases a WordPress Theme as one package, bundled with WordPress software itself, then he/she has to inherit the license of WordPress itself.
But, as far as I know, a theme is released on its own package and nobody includes the WordPress software itself along with the theme.
So I actually do not see any reason for a Theme to inherit the license of WordPress.

3. Themes based on a free CSS Template

I have created some of my themes, based on a design by Free CSS Templates. If the author of that template says the footer links to his website should not be removed, then I have to make sure people using my WordPress Theme, do not remove them.
If WordPress wants to force a theme to be GPL, then I will not be able to create any WordPress Theme based on such templates.
We may not have a Fall Season at The Green House for sure!

4. A Website’s design is not solely controlled by StyleSheet and Images

Matt and his team mentioned that any stylesheet and/or images in the theme do not need to inherit the GPL license. Well and Good, but transforming a design into an actual website, is not achieved, just by touching the stylesheet and images. A Theme developer has to write the code on the index.php ( and other .php files in the theme as well)

Suppose my theme displays a calendar like look for each one of the post as you see in my Pal Nila Theme.
To achieve this look, I put the following code inside the loop in index.php file.

<p class="post-date">
<span class="month"><?php the_date('M');?></span>
<span class="day"><?php the_date('d');?></span>
</p>

WordPress does not give me this code. It only tells me that I can use the_date() function with the right parameter, to get to the data that I want to display.
If a .php file has the code that I wrote (and it is not copying code from the default or classic WordPress themes), then I should be able to define the licensing terms on that, isn’t it?

Final Note:

I do understand that people’s views and opinions can always be different.
I am not against GPL and of course I am going to make some of my work to be GPL too, but I want to have a freedom of choice to decide which license I should release my work under.
I do not like the licensing to be forced on something that I created.

That’s all Folks! Let me know your thoughts.

If you are using my themes in any of your website, please read my licensing terms.

I still don’t believe that the GPL was conceived with the intention of being used to protect the interests of big corporations and manipulate the little guys, but it is what it is….

Update:
Please read my follow up to this post.

Enjoy!

It is a more polished version of what you see currently with WordPress 2.7 series.
The thing that I am going to talk about in this post is about the changes that are coming to “theme management”.
There is going to be a new option under “Appearance”, once you login to your WordPress installation. It will be called “Add New Themes”.

When you click on this link, you will be able to basically browse the official WordPress Theme Viewer and be able to download and install the theme on your site, right within the WordPress dashboard.

It is a nice feature, but unfortunately I have not uploaded any of my WordPress Themes into this official directory, because my themes are not GPL(General Public License).
My themes are not released under GPL. The user has to keep the footer links intact in order to use my themes for free. More about the License Information for my themes.

I am just wondering what I should do now. Let me know what you think I should do. Thanks.

There are so many new features included in this version of WordPress.
For me, the most notable among them are as follows.
1. Automatic upgrade to future versions of WordPress – as and when available, done right from the inside of WordPress Admin.
2. Threaded / Pages comments
3. New Admin UI.

Important Note:
All of my themes, either Free or Premium, will still work as it is, without any modifications.

Updated on Dec 13th 2008
It means upgrading to WordPress 2.7 will not break any of my themes., but for new features like ‘threaded comments’.
I will post again for details on how you can do it yourself.