Final Word on WordPress Themes and the GPL?
Matt Mullenweg, the founder and lead developer of the WordPress blogging platform, emailed the Software Freedom Center recently asking about the legality of WordPress themes being licensed under copyright not compatible with the GPL, and they’ve now responded, which Matt has published on the WordPress Development Blog.
The conclusion? The PHP files in WordPress themes must inherit the GPL, but CSS and Images do not. From the email:
Continue Reading…
What Do You Want to Know About WordPress?
• 18 CommentsOver the next few weeks, I want to take reader-submitted questions about WordPress and answer them here on the blog. Have a question about themes? Plugins? Simple or complicated — it doesn’t matter!
If I pick your question, I’ll answer it (in as much detail as necessary) here on the blog, and link to you as the source of the question.
Hopefully this will be a BIG help to everyone out there, and make for some really good conversation! Leave your questions in the comments.
iThemes, WordPress, and the GPL
Since starting iThemes back in early 2008, one thing Cory, and I when I joined the team, were justifiably concerned with was protecting our products, and of course our hard work, from being stolen or used without permission. This was our livelihood, so we couldn’t fool around.
Even though we both believed that we would have been within our rights to copyright the entire work, we decided that we would license all WordPress code in our themes (function calls, loops, etc.) as GPL, and protect our images, stylesheets, etc., under a copyright. We felt it was a good compromise. Continue Reading…
An Introduction to WordPress Action Hooks
If you’re going to be doing any level of WordPress development, themes or plugins, you will invariably run into the need to take advantage of the WordPress Action Hook system. But the more I am able to talk to people in the community, the more I realize that people simply don’t understand the concept very well, or at all.
In fact, one of the biggest barriers to using what is referred to as a Theme Framework or creating their own plugins is the fact that they rely heavily on Action Hooks to function properly.
Understanding this concept accelerated my level of development skills immediately after I figured out what hooks were, and how they worked. And today, I want to help you find that path too. Continue Reading…
How To Redirect a Page Using Custom Fields in WordPress
Today, I wanted to share a very quick tip that will allow you to insert an internal or external URL in a custom field for a page, and when a user visits that page, they will be redirected to the URL you put in the custom field.
Why would you need to do this? Well, if you want to add a link to your navigation menu, instead of editing code, you could just create a new page, and have that page redirect your users to the URL you specified. I’ve had clients in that situation before, and this code has come in pretty handy for them. Continue Reading…
10 Sites That Produce Quality WordPress Content
Sometimes, it’s hard to find good sources of quality WordPress content around the net. The problem is, many times good sites go unnoticed because of a lack of good marketing. Sometimes, even, good sites get sold off to bad owners. It happens.
I track a lot of WordPress content daily, so I’m happy to sort through the noise for you. My list is lean and mean, and I don’t mind sharing. Be sure to subscribe to the RSS feeds and/or follow them on twitter too.
Here are 10 sites I highly recommend if you are looking to expand your understanding of WordPress, or keep up with what’s going on in the community. Continue Reading…
Centralization of WordPress Content
• No CommentsOver at WPTavern.com, there is an interesting discussing going on about the fragmentation of quality WordPress content on different blogs. It was proposed that a central location for this information be started to aggregate all the good tutorials. Here are my thoughts.
5 Useful WordPress Functions You Didn’t Know Existed
Deep within the source code of WordPress lies an endless list of useful functions just waiting for you to use them in your theme or plugin. The problem is, most people don’t know they exist, probably because the Codex is ridiculously underdeveloped, and most people hate looking through source code. Luckily for you, reading the WordPress source code is a hobby of mine.
So, I compiled a list of some of my favorites. Some are simple and can be used by pretty much everyone; others have less common uses; but, all of them are incredibly useful. Continue Reading…
