Category Archives: WordPress

WordPress’ “GPL” and Theme Mess

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So if you follow WordPress news at all, you may have heard about a crazy thing happening right now where Automattic removed around two hundred themes from WordPress.org’s theme directory. Many of these themes were removed as they didn’t fit with Matt’s vision of the GPL. Some themes were released freely, under the GPL but were really a promotion and marketing effort for companies looking to sell themes. I didn’t have any problem with this, but it seems that Automattic does, and themes that linked back to companies that sell themes that aren’t under the GPL were removed to “protect” WordPress users.

I think this is ridiculous. I, for one, am glad that I use custom themes, and Thesis, a great premium theme. I wish that Thesis was able to be part of the WordPress theme directory to take advantage of the update and upgrade system now in WordPress core, but since Matt doesn’t agree with their business model, he punishes them directly.

Matt blames theme creators for not thinking creatively when it comes to building a business around theme development, but if he keeps cutting off their arms when they try to find ways to build a business, eventually, they will give up and move on to something that gives them a better return on investment regarding their time.

Maybe this issue will become the seed of a new mass exodus to another publishing platform? Do I hear Habari waiting in the wings? I’ve been told numerous times that Habari will let theme developers easily build a business around their themes for that platform.

This all wouldn’t bother me so much, except that Automattic is making huge boatloads of money off of WordPress and that is in large part thanks to all of the community support the platform gets.

More Reading:
Automattic putting the boot to premium theme developers
WordPress.org Pull 200 GPL Themes
200 Themes Removed From WordPress.org – Matt Explains Why
More Hypocrisy from Mullenweg and WordPress with new themes jihad

Originally posted on December 16, 2008 @ 12:33 pm

PodPress and WordPress 2.6: Last Call

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This will be the last time I post about PodPress on this blog, as I am going to be removing it and trying out all of the alternatives. Some of my previous podcasts may no longer work, but I am tired of waiting for a solution from Dan Kuykendall, who has decided to leave the community in the lurch.

For those of you that don’t know the situation, PodPress 8.8 doesn’t work, out of the box, with WordPress 2.6, as the post revisions feature has broken it. There are other issues with 8.8 as well, but the revisions issue seems to be the most common. Many people have taken to disabling the post revisions feature, which requires changing core code or adding another plugin to your WordPress installation.

PodPress 8.9 was due out over a month ago, even taking the announced delay into account. When you have such an important community feature ruined by a single plugin developer, it is a shame for everyone.

With this in mind, I hope you all try out the alternatives, and let me know how they work for you. If you have been waiting to upgrade your blog for a working PodPress 8.9, please wait no longer as there are just too many WordPress security risks to be running a version of WordPress before 2.6.

PodPress Alternatives

Podcasting – A Google Summer of Code Project
Blubrry – A recent plugin development getting huge attention.

Originally posted on September 14, 2008 @ 12:02 pm

Frustrations With WordPress: No Server Optimization Guide

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Recently, I have been talking to more and more people who are complaining about the server usage that WordPress is putting on their hosting. Some are buying inexpensive shared hosting accounts, some, like me, are on a managed VPS, while others have their own dedicated server.

The amount of server resources used by WordPress varies wildly for these people, with some coming across horrible performance walls with less traffic than myself, and others having much lower usage levels on their servers than I do. The part that bothers me so much is that there isn’t a nicely compiled guide out there to performance tune WordPress hosted blogs.

Sure, there are caching plugins, but going beyond that Matt Mullenweg has said that Automattic has helped hosting environments with their situations so that they can better support more traffic with the resources they have available, and so why isn’t there a basic server performance guide for WordPress? A best practices guide when setting up a server for displaying the PHP pages that WordPress needs to generate, or dealing with MySQL calls, or best practices for caching. Which applications should we be using to get the most performance from our WordPress blogs?

If there are so many great tips out there for making WordPress run effectively in high traffic situations, where is the organized guide for web hosts, or server owners? This could resolve so many issues that my friends are having, and help me reduce the load on my own VPS. Sure, it would take some time to compile, but the guides out there for serving up PHP pages and optimizing MySQL are currently difficult to understand, with little information on the overall benefits with relation to WordPress itself.

Come on WordPress ninjas, it is time to write a best practices guide for server administrators.

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Originally posted on September 13, 2008 @ 6:53 pm

PodPress and WordPress 2.6 Update Two

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So it now looks like the PodPress forum has over a dozen pages of spam where there should be information about the development of the PodPress plugin. The last message from the plugin author on the forum was nearly three weeks ago explaining why the release of the new version was already a week late, meaning that we are now four weeks late with a new version of the plugin.

Will we ever see a new PodPress plugin? If the current state of the forum is any indication, I wouldn’t hold my breath. If you are having any issues that can be fixed through the dozens of simple patches that people have come up with, that might be your only option unless Automattic puts out an interim release based on the fix that they’ve created. Though from what I’ve heard, they would only do such a thing if all other forms of communication broke down.

Originally posted on August 30, 2008 @ 3:48 pm

WordPress Plugin: Next of Kin

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I saw this plugin mentioned over on AdesBlog and just had to add to its promotion, as I think it is a really interesting idea.

I am always wondering how I can give my wife the information she needs to deal with my business if I ended up dying. She has the information to access my main e-mail account, but that is just one of many, and doesn’t include my blog, contact information for my boss, nor access to my other accounts relating to my work.

It could be a really frustrating situation for her if I passed away unexpectedly, and so the WordPress plugin, Next of Kin is really fascinating to me. You have a plugin that can send a message to whomever you’d like if you don’t log into your blog for a specified period of time.

Since I constantly maintain this blog, if I add it here, and set the time period to thirty days, I could then be fairly certain that the only time the message would be sent is if something horrible happened to me, as I am never away from this site longer than a month since beginning it a year ago.

I guess the question then would be, “what do you put in the message?”

I would love to hear your thoughts. What would you send in your final message, and who would you direct it to?

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Originally posted on August 30, 2008 @ 3:30 pm