WordPress Themes now included in Extend
August 5th, 2008
For quite some time, WordPress plugins have been corralled and housed under the main .org umbrella of Plugin Directory, with fair success. However, themes have languished in purgatory of http://themes.wordpress.net. Back in December of ‘07, big changes were announced, with little follow up, and led to a lock on new themes being allowed to be uploaded by designers, and all in all, a poor experience for viewers. Seems this has changed recently with the addition of themes to the Theme Directory within wordpress.org.
Which sounds great at first look, but then looking at the additional information about hosting your theme, some odd mandatory requirements are listed.
First, and I’ll be the quick to admit it’s difficult to differentiate licenses when it comes to web templates, but requiring a GPL license, when most themes I’ve seen over the years licensed as CC-SA is peculiar.
Second, mandating align classes to be specifically alignleft, alignright and aligncenter is absurd.
And finally, which to me is the real kicker, the theme MUST support Gravatars. Huh? Isn’t Gravatar a 3rd party service owned by Automattic? Why should a theme for an open source blog engine be mandated to support such a 3rd party service? So the theme could easily be used on the for profit wordpress.com site?
In my very so humble opinion, wordpress.org has officially crossed the line of differentiating the free/open source version, and the for profit entity. Heck, they might as well add Akismet as a core component and call it a day.
Shame on you Matt, and shame on those that let these requirements through.
On a side note, I find it surprisingly odd that themes not be widget ready. Go figure.
Stuff like Gravatar, tags and the image alignment classes are in core now. Whether or not something like Gravatar ought to be in core is another matter entirely, but if a feature is standard in all new WP installs then themes need to support it. After all, it’s easier for end users to remove the code than add it.
The reason all themes need to be GPL is uber-simple — Automattic want to be able to use them on wordpress.com. CC-Attribution is no good to them because they don’t want to keep vetting the footer links of dozens of themes. CC-NC is no good to them for obvious reasons. If it’s GPL they can hack it about as much as they need to, create as many derivative themes as they like, and hide any reference to the original author in the stylesheet, allowing wordpress.com users to assume it was made in-house.
If designers are prepared to put up with this, that’s fine, but it worries me that not everyone submitting themes to that site is going to be fully aware of what they’re signing up to.