While browsing wordpress.org this evening I thought I’d take a dig around the most recent free themes submitted.

I gotta tell you guys – what I saw wasn’t pretty!

I stopped looking after about the 30th theme going back to late May. I can safely say that of the 3o themes I looked at – I could not see myself using 2 of them – and that was me actively wanting myself to use as many as possible.

What I observed was interesting in itself.

1. Most new WordPress free theme submissions from the past few months are quite simply – crap.  (sorry to anyone reading this if you’re theme is on that list).
2. Of the ones that are of a decent quality – they do appear to be rips of existing popular free themes – therefore these are not really to be considered part of the innovation curve for free WordPress themes.
3. The Free WordPress Themes directory does not do a very good job at promoting at presenting new themes. Sure the directory is nice and simple but I think WordPress.org should be much more engaging when it comes to promoting themes that are suitable for business, sport, technology, news sites, magazine sites etc. Sometimes it’s a bit of a needle in a haystack trying to find a certain theme. Sure we have a Most Popular Themes listing but all this really does is show the cream of the crop – it doesn’t show you the themes that YOU need for YOUR requirements. This is something that needs to be thought about and enhanced on wordpress.org.

What this shows us is that the Premium Themes market is playing an increasingly important role in bridging the gap between hobbyists who are producing free but substandard wordpress themes and business/professional WordPress users who need a more professional theme for their website or blog. WordPress needs a vibrant commercial ecosystem that plays nice with it’s core GPL foundations in order to continue to thrive. It’s clear that this can be challenging and alien to some commercial theme/plugin developers as we’ve seen recently. But this is the world we live in folks and we have to find a way for this to work well for the whole community because it’s long term sustained success depends on it.

I spotted a tweet from Andrew Nacin this evening mentioning a new project from Alex King which has just gone live called Carringon Build.

This project is huge news for WordPress developers, website owners and theme designers.

In a nutshell Carrington Build is a full featured drag and drop layout control system that hooks directly into WordPress. But describing it like that is like describing a Porche as being a fast car – it just doesn’t do it justice.

This thing is definitely one of the more exciting WordPress innovations I’ve seen in recent times.

My only concern at the moment is the whopping $499 price tag that it currently comes with.

[UPDATE: Alex has clarified in the comments below that $499 is for the Carrington Build Developer Version for a single site. Potential customers also have the option of getting Carrington Build baked into the Carrington Business Theme all set up and ready to go for $149 which is an excellent deal in my book]

For the moment I think mass adoption of this feature will be limited due to the high price tag but I can see a ready made market for custom theme designers and wordpress developers doing consulting work on behalf of clients to build the cost of this plugin into their development costs.

I’ve not looked to see if Alex is applying a GPL license to this plugin which I would think would be a good idea if Matt and Automattic are to help nurture this plugin. I would love nothing more to see this added to the WordPress core some day!

Well done Alex to you and your team and the best of luck with Carrington Build.

• Main Carrington Build intro.

So I was having a few brews over in the WordPress Tavern earlier today when I stumbled across a new wordpress theme called Portfolio.

The full details of the theme can be found on the main Portfolio Theme details page.

After taking Portfolio Theme for a quick spin in the themesforge labs I must say I’m impressed.

Devin from wptheming.com has put together a really solid WordPress theme that utilises the new WordPress 3.0+ custom post types functionality to create a slick Portfolio manager that incorporates a featured image feature.

I could see many different uses for this WordPress theme but I think it will particularly suit any freelance designer or web agency who wishes to create a simple but effective portfolio based website.

Well done Devin and looking forward to seeing more of your work!

One of the most controversial and hotly debated public arguments in the WordPress community ended this week when Chris Pearson of DiyThemes.com changed the license for his very popular Thesis theme to a split GPL license which has the backing of Matt Mullenweg of WordPress.

In a nutshell, the decision by Chris to switch to a split GPL license ends a potentially nasty and expensive legal battle between Matt and Chris – which in the long run would only damage the entire WordPress community as whole. For this alone, Chris’s decision must be praised.

We had covered the recent war of words between Matt and Chris which extended out to a Mixergy.com video cast and things had gotten pretty nasty. But it would appear it is now safe to say the issue is closed. I purposely didn’t post on this announcement for a few days to observe how the community would react.

It would appear that the community as a whole is relieved that the issue did not go to a legal battle and the general impression is that Chris has done the right thing in switching to a split GPL license. I would also suspect that the additional revelations that Thesis has taken entire core snippets from the WordPress core would strengthen the WordPress legal case and at a minimum lead to a copyright infringement case was enough for Chris to make a prudent business decision – even if his ideological stance has not changed – which I’ve no evidence to the contrary that it has. I would suspect that Chris still strongly believes in the views he expressed on the Mixergy videocast and has only made this decision to save his business from a costly legal case.

For now, the issue is closed. I fear we’ve not heard the last of the WordPress Theme/Plugin GPL debate. For now, I’ve decided to not reinstate my affiliate links to the Thesis theme as the whole affair has left me with a bad impression of what the Thesis guys are about and frankly I don’t want to do business with them at this point. Sorry guys you’ve lost me as an affiliate. I shall keep close attention to how Thesis evolves in this new reality though.

So I’m doing some Sunday driving today and taking a closer look at WordPress Custom Post Types and how they can be implemented into WordPress themes in WordPress 3.0.

I must admit, this is pretty powerful stuff and the lines between theme development and plugin development are blurring a lot more now in 3.0 than ever before.

Anyway, those for interested here’s a quick list of 5 Must Read tutorials on WordPress Custom Post Types that will get you up to speed on what you can do with it:

• As usual Jason Tadlock has the definitive skinny on the latest and greatest WordPress innovations – go read his Custom Post Types in WordPress
• Nice and simple modification of TwentyTen to use an events custom post type from Design Juices
• Nettuts don’t usually take long to provide an excellent walk through of the latest WordPress developments, and they’ve not dissapointed with their latest tutorial on Rock Solid Custom Post Types.
• Excellent tutorial from Voosh Themes on creating a Portfolio listing using Custom Post Types.
• Nice little mini-tutorial with the option to download some source code from Konstantin over at kovshenin.com

As WordPress and Thesis continue to wage war over the past week, I’ve just been tuned into the WordPress Podcast where Matt Cutts is online with Yoast and Frederick having a broad discussion about Matt’s experience with WordPress and as usual Matt is full of interesting stories and facts about not only SEO but also his and Google’s experiences with WordPress.

As I type, the show is still going – tune in on Webmaster Radio and I’m sure it will pop up in their main iTunes feed in the next few days.

The conversation inevitable turned to the GPL war of words and Matt did hint that he is considering switching away from Thesis and perhaps back to a WordPress 3.0 compliant theme.

His reasons weren’t directly related to the GPL battle itself and more about how the WordPress core now supports many things he would have used a more advanced theme like Thesis for before 3.0.

Nevertheless, to see another high profile blog switch away from Thesis would no doubt be another blow for Thesis support across the WordPress community.

So diythemes.com – producers of the infamous Thesis WordPress theme got hacked today. Apart from the fact that it’s nasty for anyone to get hacked at any stage, this event inadvertently reignited the WordPress/Automattic vs. Thesis war of words after some follow up tweeting from what I can make out.

The war of words is still very much in progress and you can follow the exchanges over on Twitter.

In a nutshell it would seem that Matt has had enough and is going after Thesis in a big way and even offering to buy alternative GPL compliant premium themes for Thesis users.

It now also looks like this may end up going down the legal route.

In response to this tweet, Matt responded:

@flashingcursor Working on it, even though it breaks my heart. If the GPL is invalid, vast swathes of Open Source die #thesiswp

Looks like this is going to get a lot messier before it is all sorted out. For those living under a rock this entire debacle has been covered to death across the WordPress community but it essentially boils down to two opposing views that incite as much emotion as a religious or political debate:

• Pro GPL Community – Strongly held belief that all themes, plugins that are distributed publicly (whether they are sold or not) must inherit the GPL license. Why is this important? Essentially this means that the community can extend and re-distribute ANY theme, plugin etc. that is created – whether the author supports that position or not. Most premium theme sellers don’t have an issue with this and have largely prospered on this basis and have built sustainable business models on it.
• Pro Commercial Distribution License – A select and vocal few vehemently oppose this position. They strongly believe that anything plugin or theme that they produce does not fall under the GPL license and therefore they can restrict what their customers can use their products for.

Up to now, things have been heated but it now looks like things are escalating and we may see a court battle to settle this once and for all.

Personally I’ve watched this with great interest and strongly advocate and support Matt’s position on all of this. WordPress after all has primarily thrived because of the very fact that the core software is distributed under the GPL. The more I listen and read on the subject the more I see that if WordPress is to continue to thrive into the future, the more critical it becomes that this fundamental spirit of openness, collaboration and community is protected and nurtured. I followed many other open source GPL projects in the past only to see the community ripped apart because of ideological differences between prominent members of the community. I think and hope that this time it’s different. This time I think the community are very much on side with Matt’s stance on this and that ultimately Thesis must change it’s licensing policy or else it will ultimately decline and die.

For now, I’ve removed any affiliate links I previously had pointing to DIYthemes. I think Thesis is a fine theme framework but I can’t support it as long as it doesn’t share the same core values of the WordPress project.

UPDATE: There’s a nice post by Mitch Canter here taking this a little bit further.

Probably the last thing that the WordPress dev team want to think about now is new feature requests for future versions of WordPress. In fact, the team have already stated that they’ll be taking a break from feature development for a few months which is cool and gives us all time to get to grips with 3.0 and stretch it, bend it and break it (hopefully not breaking it too much!)

Well in the meantime, I’m throwing down my 2 cents about things I think can be further improved in future wordpress branches and releases. I’ve been using wordpress for many years but recently I’ve been really stretching it for a number of clients who would have traditionally been used to enterprise CMS products (shudder!). WordPress knocks the socks of these so called enterprise CMS products on just about every front.

Just about.

Hopefully I can highlight some key areas for improvement that will effectively make wordpress a serious option for just about ANY site possible – without sacrificing it’s pure ease of use that already makes it a real winner.

• Fix deployment – Ok this is a big one. So I’ve spent weeks and months building a site on a local development machine and then come to move it to a live server. Joomla does this with one or two code line changes. WordPress – not so much. At least not that I’ve seen. It’s quite common to see users struggle with image path problems, permalink id’s being hardcoded in the db and not easily changed. Yes, there are nice little plugins like Search and Replace which do go some way to fixing this already but deployment is such a core part of wordpress development that it really should be managed better within the product itself.
• Fix permissions -A lot of shared hosts these days run php with fast-cgi or some flavour which allows wordpress to run under the user’s own server user account. This is fine and dandy until you put wordpress under some serious load and need to switch to php_mod. Once you do this you’re left with little option but to start setting world writeable permissions on lots of individual directories that while there’s no other way around it – should be simplified and maybe centralised. This would at least take some of the guesswork out of the process. While this isn’t something that is specific to WordPress, I think this does need to be looked at – especially establishing a standard convention for plugin developers to follow to make life easier for sysadmins to know what needs writeable permissions.
• Better widget management – Ever tried setting up a site to have context specific widgets displayed on specific pages, in a specific order? Yip it’s not so easy. Again yes there are some plugins which go some way to helping with this but this is something I feel strongly should be part of the core and wouldn’t over complicate WordPress. Take a leaf out of how Joomla handle module display. It’s quite simple but powerful.
• Admin GUI still needs work – Ok so you’ve found that plugin that will solve all your woes and make your life all that much better. You go ahead and install it. Now where the hell is it? Did it get it’s own tab or is it buried within Settings or Tools? Anyone? A more elegant and usable scenario would be to centralise where all plugins get installed. I often find the WordPress UI can VERY cluttered by the time you’ve installed the full remit of plugins you could be using on a production site. Time to think about scalability guys.

Anyway, that’s it for now. I’ve a thousand other ideas swirling around in my head but those are the new that keep coming to the surface. So what do you think needs to be the focus for future wordpress releases?

So once again, bravo to the WordPress team and all those who contribute to the community for getting 3.0 out the door. Enjoy your well earned break from core development. Also be safe in the knowledge that the community for feature suggestion is alive and kicking

Something interesting popped up today in the twittersphere with the release by Ian Stewart of a new free HTML5 WordPress theme called Toolbox.

Ian is one of the smart guys in the wordpress community and it must be said that having taken a quick peek under the hood of Toolbox, it really is an excellent start theme for anyone looking to get their hands dirty with HTML5 wordpress themes.

So what’s a starter theme?

A starter theme is not an all singing all dancing full featured wordpress theme with widgets, theme options etc. It’s a stripped down bare bones starting point which is more suited for a developer or designer looking for a rock solid starting point for building their own wordpress themes.

As Ian says:

Alright. Toolbox is a blank, HTML5, WordPress starter theme. Out of the box, it features:

• The latest in plain, old, semantic HTML5 markup.
• Ultra-minimal (it looks like there’s no CSS at all), fluid, em-based CSS that won’t get in your way when you’re starting a design.
• It’s free to use for commercial and public projects.

I’ll certainly be playing around with Toolbox a bit more over the next few weeks to see what how I can put it to good use.

Go get it now.

Great to see that WordPress 3.0 has been officially released. Anyone paying attention to the wordpress dev blog will have seen the rapid RC releases appearing over the past few weeks so it’s great to see 3.0 is now official. We’re planning to release a brand spanking new theme in the next few weeks which will be 3.0 compatible so stay tuned for more information on that.

In the meantime there’s a nice tutorial here about how to make use of the shiny new Custom Post Types in your wordpress themes.

Here’s the skinny in video from WordPress.