WordPress Themes and the GPL – again?

This issue of theme theft, re-selling (or conflicting business models and the GPL) comes up every couple months. This obviously sucks, but based on the current WordPress code structure and theme distribution model, there isn’t a lot which can be done – it is the nature of the beneficial beast that is working with open source licensing models. It caused me to think outside the box and ponder a different approach to resolve the problem at hand.

In the 2 years since I originally wrote that article, the premium theme industry developed around a number of thriving businesses. Today, most of the theme developers who sell their wares do so entirely under the GPL. The symptoms causing the questions to be raised may have changed, but the important ones still remain:

1. Can (or will) developers distribute their work under multiple licenses which would respect the source code base license?
2. What do you do if someone does not respect the license that your product is distributed under?
3. How will this on-going conversation affect the open-source community surrounding WordPress?

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Solving a custom field query quandry

Storing the details of a rideshare offer / request lends itself well to custom fields, especially when More Fields is used for data capture. I found a solution to a complex display challenge: How to display a set of posts based on multiple custom field values? This post demonstrates get_post_meta_multiple, a function you could include in your theme to allow you to filter based on an infinite number of custom field key / value pairs.

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The Power of Custom Fields

Custom Fields are the way of enabling authors to store meta-data against an individual post / page in Wordpress. If you are doing more than just basic data storage / display with custom fields in Wordpress, the list of links in this post will be of great interest to you.

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Template – Retail Locations

Learn how to capture and display custom fields in a template using More Fields, a plugin that “enables you to define post types, which are custom Write/Edit pages that contains a pre-defined set of boxes”

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Also posted in ICE, Tutorials | 3 Comments

WordPress Developer Pub Night

Tuesday July 7th, 2009 will be the first Ottawa WordPress Developers Pub Night. Location and time are subject to interest from the community. Current theory is a start time of 8pm at Shoeless Joe’s at 3049 Carling Ave which has cheap wing night on Tues and very nice booths.

The two best ways to let them know you’re interested in attending are either post a comment on their blog or follow and tweet to them on Twitter – @wdgo. I know there are more than a few people in Ottawa who use Wordpress for great things including myself. I look forward to meeting them for a few pints to talk about what we would all like to give / get from a community developer group for our platform of choice.

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What’s on WordPress.tv?

Automattic has launched their own “visual resource for all things WordPress”. I explore what channels I’d like to see on Wordpress.tv.

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WordPress: Commited to open source

Do you believe in open source because it has lower overhead or because it is the right thing to do? Where is the balance between capitalistic goals and social obligations?

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Premium or Proprietary Themes?

Premium implies being inherrently better than the alternatives. Proprietary is an accurate representation of the licensing restrictions. Which one is better or right?

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A taste of things to come with 2.7

Screenshots of what the new admin UI for Wordpress will look like and further analysis of why I am excited about the next release.

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Flash + WordPress = Flashpress

An overview and developer interview of a plugin which aims to mix the UI design strengths of Flash with the backend content management excellence of Wordpress.

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