I’m hoping that my boss Matt Mullenweg sharing the legal opinion on “Themes are GPL, too” will put the issue to rest for the majority of the community (emphasis mime):

“PHP in WordPress themes must be GPL, artwork and CSS may be but are not required.
…
Even though graphics and CSS aren’t required to be GPL legally, the lack thereof is pretty limiting. Can you imagine WordPress without any CSS or JavaScript? So as before, we will only promote and host things on WordPress.org that are 100% GPL or compatible. To celebrate a few folks creating 100% GPL themes and providing support and other services around them, we have a new page listing GPL commercially supported themes.”

The legal opinion was provided by Software Freedom Law Center. Council James Vasile provided the findings and blogs at hackervisions.org . James also has posted about this on his own blog in the article “CMS Themes and the GPL“. As I commented there, my fear is:

“people read what they want to get out of it, and case law is the only thing that moves them.”

The legal finding and unchanged policy  are consistent with the intentions of the WordPress developer community and what has been promoted for the four years I’ve been involved.

Talking about licensing really is the suck. Matt’s article became necessary lately as some commercial theme developers have been very aggressive to WordPress community members, who have shared theme code as allowed by WordPress’s viral GPL v2 license.

It frustrates me when I read commercial theme developers complaining about people “stealing” their themes after the thousands of hours they have worked. They make no mention of the hundreds of thousands of hours others have worked on WordPress (counting on the  GPL protecting their freedoms ).

The incredibly exciting news is seeing the various commercially developed and supported themes embrace the GPL in the last 9 months. Theme collections like ThemeShaper (Thematic FrameWork), StudioPress (previously Revolution 2),  and WooThemes are all 100% GPL — those are just the ones I’m familar with, be sure to check out the theme offerings of the other commercially supported GPL themes.

We conducted a small poll recently, where we asked WordPress users the method they use to post content to their blogs. The poll is now closed and here are the results of the poll.

And the winner and best way to post content to your blog is the WordPress Dashboard Write Panel, coming in a distant 2nd is desktop applications like Windows Live Writer.

So why do people prefer using the write panel? There could be several reasons for this, the most important one I can think of is that, when writing posts using the write panel users have access to the features plugins provide them with.

Another reason I think is not many users may be aware of the availability of desktop applications for blogging. Also many people may really feel comfortable blogging using the write panel too.

On the other hand desktop applications like WLW do provide users with a familiar interface and the flexibility to blog from their desktops.

What are your views on this poll results? Do let me know.

Post from: Weblog Tools Collection

Best Method To Post Content To WordPress

bbPress 1.0 final, finally released: For those of us that are also fans and users of bbPress, bbPress version 1.0 is finally released. Many improvements over the 0.9 versions include cookie integration with WordPress, various fixes, JQuery integration, a complete XML-RPC API, new admin interface, new icons, improved spam management and much more. Backup files and database and disable all plugins prior to upgrade but our test upgrade went amazingly well and everything continued to work post upgrade.

Post from: Weblog Tools Collection

bbPress 1.0 Bechet Released

New Plugins

External Files

External Files provides a shortcode [external] that wraps around a file path or url. The contents of the file/url are imported and outputted in an xhtml-friendly way. What’s more, the plugin auto-guesses the syntax of the file (by looking at the extension of the path or the content-type of the url).

RSS Shortcode

Allows you to embed an RSS feed in your blog post by using WordPress shortcodes.

BuddyPress Contents

BuddyPress content aggregation and organization.

Real-Time Find and Replace

Set up find and replace rules that are executed AFTER a page is generated by WordPress, but BEFORE it is sent to a user’s browser.

Supr by StumbleUpon

Su.pr is the only URL shortener that gets you more traffic and save time posting to Twitter, Facebook and StumbleUpon.

Updated Plugins

Shorten2Ping

Sends status updates to Ping.fm or Twitter everytime you publish a post. Using Bit.ly or Tr.im for the permalinks (accounts on these services required). So this way you can send status to many sites at once if you have a Ping.fm account.

Meebo Me

meebo me lets you chat with your site visitors using your Meebo account. Visitors on your blog can hit a simple button and chat with you when you are logged into meebo. This is an easy and free way to interact with your visitors.

GD Star Rating

GD Star Rating is post, page and comment rating and review plugin for WordPress. Plugin supports different image sets, rating moderation, vote rules, time restricted voting, templates, trend calculations, multi ratings, templated rendering, has a widgets build in and extensive shortcode support. Plugin can be integrated with comments for making a review website.

WordPress Console

An interactive console for WordPress developers

Flickr + Highslide

This plugin displays flickr photos using highslide.

Easy AdSense

Easy AdSense manages all aspects of Google AdSense for your blog: insert ads into posts and sidebar, and add a Google Search box.

Post from: Weblog Tools Collection

WordPress Plugin Releases for 07/03

That’s right, bbPress 1.0 finally hits the tubes!

After many months in alpha, beta and release candidate status, bbPress 1.0 final is now available for download.

Thanks to the many testers who contributed so much important feedback during the pre-release period, going way back to 1.0 alpha 1.

This release offers many usability improvements, based on making bbPress more approachable for adopters who are accustomed to WordPress. To that end bbPress 1.0 now has a similar administration interface to WordPress and uses similar descriptions and names where appropriate. bbPress also behaves more like WordPress when it comes to things like automatically generating your .htaccess file when setting up permalinks.

Here are a few of the improvements over the 0.9 series:

• “Voices” count on topics reports the number of individuals participating in a conversation
• Native support for cookie integration (single sign-on) with Wordpress 2.7 and 2.8
• Optional support for memcached object caching
• Time-zone and Daylight Savings time support
• A complete XML-RPC publishing API
• Pingback support – each topic can receive pingbacks, just like a blog post
• All javascript has been moved to jQuery
• Optionally allow login via email address as well as username
• New meta API allows arbitrary meta data to be stored for posts, topics, forums, options, tags or even meta (that’s right, meta-meta – first legitimate use wins a prize)!
• Display names used primarily for user identification display, which allows special characters to be used
• Themes can now have a “functions.php” file, which is automatically loaded
• Accessibility improvements on forms and in the default theme, including WAI-ARIA roles
• Major overhaul of the admin interface
• Optional Akismet statistics page
• Cute new icons from Ben Dunkle (pictured above)
• Improved use of posts admin to manage spam
• Prettier Kakumei (default) theme
• Hello Louie! Plugin

If you are upgrading from any earlier release to 1.0 then you absolutely should backup all you files and database before doing so. You also may need to make minor adjustments to your templates. Before upgrading, disable all plugins.

Dedication

bbPress 1.0 is named “Bechet” (pronounced beh-shay) after the pioneering jazz saxophonist Sidney Bechet.

WordPress provides users with various ways to post content to their blogs, the best part is that it does not limit users to write their views.

However we all use different methods to post content to our blog and it would be interesting to know which is the most used way to post content to a WordPress blog.

Here is a short poll, please choose the method you use frequently to post content to your blog, you can select more than one options, also don’t forget to tell us why you use a certain method to post content to your blog.

This poll requires JavaScript, please visit the website to vote

Post from: Weblog Tools Collection

How Do You Post Content To Your Blog?

I’ve recently noticed some posts on the BuddyPress forums where people are having problems getting WordPress MU and BuddyPress running locally on their machine.

I spent some time today to put together a twenty minute video that will show you how to set up and run WordPress MU and BuddyPress locally on a Mac. There is a tool you can use that will make this very easy called MAMP. For those of you running Windows, there is a similar tool called WAMP that will basically do the same thing.

I also make use of Textmate in this screen cast to edit the hosts file, if you don’t use it you can simply open the Finder, use the “Go” menu, and then the “Go to folder” option. Enter /etc/ as the folder and then scroll to the “hosts” file and use the editor of your choice. If you are familiar with the terminal you can also use your command line editor of choice.

I highly recommend you turn on the HD option for this video and make it full screen, that way you’ll easily be able to read and follow along.