WordPress Launches Theme Team, Challenges Blogger For Theme Supremacy

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Even though WordPress already has a large selection of themes, it looks like the WP masters were not thrilled with what they currently had in their inventory.

In order to help widen the selection of themes available, Automattic is launching “The Theme Team” which they hope will attract more quality theme developers as well as more themes for WP.com and WP.org.

I’m super-excited to announce to you today that WordPress.com now has an official Theme Team. In a nutshell, we’re a bunch of people who really care about WordPress Themes and want to see them get better and better—on WordPress.com and for every WordPress.org user. And yes, that means we’re getting more themes, more often. […] [Read more…]

Software Freedom Law Center Says WordPress Themes are GPL

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Matt Mullenweg has, in an attempt to clear the confusion with themes and the GPL license they might or might not inherit from WordPress, contacted the Software Freedom Law Center, who was instrumental in creating the GPL version 3 license. The reply, which is presented as a whole in the wordpress.org blog, basically says that while CSS and images might not be “tainted” by the GPL license, the template files surely are since they load WordPress functions and rely on them to work. [Read more…]

Commercial GPL Themes Gets Pimped on WordPress.org

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The hub of all things WordPress, as in the kind you install on your own, is wordpress.org. There’s both a plugin and a theme directory there, and the latter has now gotten some commercial (aka premium) themes treatment. However, the new page merely lists some resellers of commercial GPL themes, so this is not the marketplace a lot of people has been waiting for.

Some of them you may pay for access, some of them are membership sites, some may give you the theme for zero-cost and just charge for support. What they all have in common is people behind them who support open source, WordPress, and its GPL license.

If you’re selling GPL themes for WordPress you can get listed, just scroll down to the bottom of the page. Personally, I think the themes should be hosted on wordpress.org so that they got automatic updates and so on, but that’s a whole other story. I do hope this is just the first step of many in this area, but we’ll see. An official blog post has yet to outline this addition, which might or might not have been up for some time, I really can’t tell.

WordPress News: BuddyPress News, WordPress 2.8 News, WordCamp Toronto & Virginia, WordPress.tv Feeds, and More

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WordPress 2.8 News: The final stages of development, testing, and patching is underway for the release of WordPress 2.8. The latest news on the next version of WordPress includes: [Read more…]