The Full Story Behind WP-Wallpaper

If you’ve been scouring the web for WordPress specific images to use as your desktop background, have a look at WP-Wallpaper. The site doesn’t have a huge variety of images to choose from now but over the course of the next few months, I think that will change. I reached out to Alison Barrett who manages the site to find out about its history and what plans if any she has for the site.

WordPress Lights by Alison Barrett

Can you provide a brief history of the domain, considering it existed before you purchased it?

I don’t know much about the previous owner of the domain. The original site was my main source of desktop wallpapers for a long time, and I had referred dozens of people to it. I was bummed when I learned the site was down. I went searching for the owner, and I didn’t realize the domain had expired until the whois search turned up empty.

Do you know of any other sites that have an abundant amount of WordPress desktop wallpapers?

I can’t think of any other dedicated WP wallpaper sites off the top of my head, though a Google search might turn up one or two. I didn’t come across any when I was searching for the creators of the wallpapers on the original site.

My initial reason for buying the domain was that I felt bad for referring friends to something that wasn’t even live anymore. Now I’m enjoying running the site, and I love seeing all the excitement around it. The community’s response to it is driving me to keep making it even better. I would love to find the creators of the wallpapers from the original site, because there were a lot of gorgeous images up there. I don’t want to republish them without attribution and permission.

Any chance of getting this site linked to from the Fan Art section of WordPress.org or having a small dedicated section showing 3-6 wallpapers?

I hadn’t thought about getting this site linked under the Fan Art section on .org—that’s a great idea! I’ll see what I can do.

Any chance of adding a ratings system, reviews, or any other social aspects to the images similar to DeviantArt?

I do plan on implementing a ratings system eventually, though my priority right now is supporting multiple resolutions for each wallpaper (including mobile). I will probably add some sharing tools in the near future as well.

How can people submit images to the site and how should the submissions be licensed?

Wallpapers can be submitted through the form on the submit page: http://wp-wallpaper.com/submit/ . Technical requirements are laid out there (and will be updated once I get mobile resolution support in place). Images must be released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license, as that is what they are distributed under on the site.

Oops: After The Launch

After this interview was conducted with Alison, I did some research into the history of the domain since she didn’t know too much about it. I plugged the domain into the Wayback machine and didn’t see any results. For a site that Alison pointed to over the years for WordPress wallpapers, it stands to reason it would have some history behind it. Just for experimentation, I added an S to the end of the domain so it was http://wp-wallpapers.com/ and while that particular domain has expired, it did show up with quite a few results in the Wayback machine.

The first record on the internet archive is for October 17th 2011. This entry tells us that WP-Wallpapers.com used the Expose theme from ThemeForest to show off the content of the site. That theme is still available for sale but is not 100% GPL licensed.

The next entry was a WordPress maintenance page. However, On March 31st 2012, the site had a few pages of Wallpapers available. It’s also during this time that we discover the site was owned and operated by the Envato network. The last working entry is on March 23rd, 2013 with at least 5 pages worth of wallpaper images.

Conclusions

So not only has Alison pointed people to the wrong domain over the years, she also purchased the wrong domain. She missed it by one letter. I reached out to Envato to find out what their plans are for the domain:

We’re always trying to streamline our processes and focus more on the projects that really matter to us, which is why we decided to discontinue WP-Wallpapers.com. But we’re really happy to see WP-Wallpaper spring up to fill the gap! There are definitely some beautiful, creative WordPress wallpapers around.

Despite everything that’s happened up to this point with WP-Wallpaper.com, Alison is still excited to see the site grow.