A Liverpool Web Designer

We’ve ended up getting a lot of attention lately for our themes club thanks to being the first to report on WordPress.org’s withdrawal of 200 themes from their theme directory.

We were, quite honestly, annoyed by this. Hurt even. We’d decided to release GPL themes as a way of giving something back to WordPress. Yes, GPL themes also drive a bit of traffic to our site, but we don’t really see a problem with that - on our site we provide support, help and information about WordPress that’s visible to all and at zero cost.

It got us thinking, somewhat, about how all this works.  Had there been no themes and plugins for WordPress in the first instance, WordPress would never have succeeded.  By contributing our latest and most attractive themes, using some interesting new code, we felt we were helping to maybe move the GPL themes game forward a little.  We even had plans for a free version of Caribou.

Now, I’ve always had my doubts about GPL - especially v2 which comes from a rather different era than today’s Web 2.0 times.  I know that GPL is there to protect intellectual property and keep what was meant to be free, free.  But today the applications you use, such as WordPress.com, aren’t in neat compiled applications that you install - they’re on a remote server somewhere else.  That remote application is as closed to you or I as the code that runs my TV.  There is no freedom.

Anyway, it means things will change shortly in the business.  We’re probably going to back out of GPL entirely (themes don’t have to be GPL, no matter what the zealots say) because we feel the spirit of it has been broken by Matt Mullenweg.  Instead we’re going to find a more up-to-date license.  Don’t worry - what’s free will stay free.

We also have an online application in the offing - we’ve had a few ideas floating about over time, but this one is both simple, straightforward to monetise and useful.  Watch this space.

Oh, and a quick trackback to our shiny new Evening Sun theme, because I want to show how it hides trackbacks if they go over a certain number - a very cute feature.

If you can see this post then you’ve arrived at the site’s new home.  I’ve put up an early version of our Grassland 2 theme on here as a sneak preview.

Why The Move?

Well, it actually all became a little more complex, but mostly it was because we wanted to do more with our blog.  No problem.  The theme we were using, DePo Masthead, had a number of issues and we wanted to correct them and contribute the changes back.  However, it turns out that the theme isn’t available to all.

The move has nothing at all to do with what happened over Spectacu.la - a story you can read about at:  http://spectacu.la/wordpressorg-pull-200-gpl-themes/ which although annoying for us has suddenly raised our profile rather dramatically - so it’s not all bad.  But no, this wasn’t a case of spiting WordPress.com - we simply had other requirements in mind and it made sense to use the blog as a way of showing off some of our skills.  The timing is coincidental, but we’d paid for the domain option on WordPress.com until 13th of December.  Today is the 13th of December!