While in a session at WPChat.com last night, I talked with a few members of the WordPress community regarding what constitutes theme piracy as well as the role the WordPress.org support forums should take regarding commercial theme support. While I’m still not 100% what is piracy and what is not, I know for sure that…
A few days ago, I mentioned that the readme file for repository hosted plugins was updated so that authors could provide a short explanation as to why a user should upgrade to the newest version. The readme file has been updated again to include support for videos. According to Michael Adams who is responsible for…
Chip Bennett has an interesting post on his site that shows results of an audit he performed on some of the most popular plugin authors to see if they declared what license the plugin is under within the plugin in the form of a license.txt file or from within the plugin header. As we’ve found…
News is spreading around the community that the plugins created by MaxBlogPress have been removed from the plugin repository. Apparently, his plugins contained a forced opt-in mechanism that is, once you installed the plugin, you had to provide a name and email address in order to activate the plugin. Based on numerous complaints over the…
As was announced on Twitter by quite a few people, the WordPress theme repository has now transitioned to hosting over 1,000 themes. The 1,000th theme to be added to the repository is called page-tiny. It was designed for simplicity but unfortunately, the screenshot of the theme is a 404. However, the preview button does work.…
Now that the WordPress plugin competition for 2009 is complete, Ozh has published his reviews of each plugin that was entered into the competition. Some of his reviews mention particular security issues that were discovered along with some shoddy coding. Once I read his reviews, it occurred to me that if the plugins in the…
Recently, it was announced that there is now a commercial GPL themes page that was added to the WordPress theme repository. Now, there is discussion that there should be a page on the plugin repository for commercial GPL plugins. While Matt has said that there is no need for this because the repository already has…
Commercial theme authors who switched their business model to be completely inline with the GPL just like the WordPress software are cheering today as some of them have made the first part of a list that is now on the WordPress.org theme repository page under the heading of Commercial. The links do not contain affiliate…
Ptah Dunbar has been working on his very own Theme Framework for quite some time now and today, after five revisions the framework has ended up on the theme repository for download. According to Ptah, this is what we can expect from the framework: A blank WordPress Theme Framework that’s everything you need, and nothing…
Justin Tadlock, a notable theme developer in the WordPress community recently published his thoughts on why the WordPress theme repository is in need of an upgrade. Among his arguments is that the ability to update a theme via subversion needs to be added, the community needs a way to police itself and the ability to…