As a huge proponent of the GPL, this is exciting. However, as Joost pointed out in On the GPL, Themes, Plugins & Free, there’s some disappointment as well. The exciting part is that a question that’s long been asked has been answered by a “pro” (albeit a biased “pro”), and the answer is just what many of us wanted to see. Now we can get some people to focus on commercially supported GPL themes rather than just themes with more restrictive licenses. They have even added a Commercially Supported GPL Themes page to wordpress.org! That’s awesome, and a great followup to Matt’s “State of the Word” talk at WordCamp San Francisco.

So what’s the problem? Well, Matt has said that the plugin developers have been the rock stars in the WordPress community, and it’s time for the theme designers to shine. I have no problem with the theme designers getting to shine, but as a plugin developer I wonder “Where is the Commercially Supported GPL Plugins page? I love to give to the community with GPL WordPress plugins, and will continue to do so, but I’ll also be offering premium support for many of these in the future. I’d like to see the same treatment for theme designers and plugin developers.

Having said all that, I’m really glad to see the GPL themes page and I think it’s a good step in the right direction.

Related Posts:

• The Xavisys WordPress Plugin Framework
• 10 Great WordPress Plugins
• State of the Word from WordCamp – Part 2
• State of the Word from WordCamp – Part 1
• The Problem with Related Post Plugins

“WordPress should be invisible” was something I loved to hear Matt Mullenweg say during his “State of the Word” address at WordCamp San Francisco. What did he mean by that? He was trying to say that WordPress should be out of the way so you can focus on your content. This means a few things. First, WordPress needs to be extremely easy to use so you don’t have to think about what you’re doing, and fast so it’s not frustrating to use. Second, WordPress needs to be powerful so that you’re never in a position where it’s keeping you from doing what you want. Lastly, in order to accomplish the first two things, WordPress needs to be flexible and have supporting tools. If you try to make it do everything, then it will end up too complex. If you make it too simple, it won’t do everything. Flexibility and plugins is the only way to have the best of both worlds.

To address the ease of use and speed issues, Matt talked about how they have been “focusing on making it faster”. The release of version 2.8 has been greatly delayed, but Matt assured everyone that the delay was not without reason. They have been concentrating on infrastructure, trying to simplify things and speed them up.

To address the need to do everything, Automattic has worked on the plugin system (especially the Widget System). They have also been releasing some of their own stuff, such as PollDaddy, WordPress.com stats, intenseDebate comments, and their soon to be released VideoPress. Add that to the quickly growing list of quality plugins from popular sites like picApp means that you can easily make WordPress do nearly anything you want.

Lastly, Matt says they’re doing plenty to make WordPress easy to extend. My favorite idea that he talked about was canonical plugins. Basically, WordPress would officially “bless” a plugin as the main plugin for a specific purpose, to encourage the community to get behind it. For example, maybe Twitter Widget Pro would be chosen for handling Twitter feeds. Since the plugin is marketed by WordPress as the standard for a specific purpose, it would be more likely that someone would help make the plugin better rather than just make their own similar plugin. This should REALLY help plugins progress.

Something else that Matt mentioned is that WordPress is one of the fastest growing “skills in demand” on freelance sites. It’s officially the fastest growing skill on Elance, and has seen a 427% increase in popularity on oDesk, putting it in higher demand than writing or SEO! The great thing about these numbers is that the more a skill is in demand, the more people will try to meet that demand, which means the next time you need WordPress Development, it will be easier to get it done. Thanks everyone for making WordPress better.

Related Posts:

• State of the Word from WordCamp – Part 1
• Google's Matt Cutts on WordPress
• Why BuddyPress
• WordCamp San Francisco 2009
• WordCamp San Francisco 2009

Matt started with a quick history of WordPress. For those that don’t know, WordPress was a fork of B2 and was later officially recognized by the B2 creator as the “official” continuation of B2. A couple of the more major milestones he mentioned include that plugins were introduced in WordPress 1.2 and themes were introduced in WordPress 1.5. He then proceeded to give some rather impressive statistics. They’ve had nearly 10 million downloads in the last twelve months, nearly twice what they had in the twelve months prior to that. They are tracking approximately 5.5 million installed (.org) blogs.

Everyone knows that Matt’s a huge proponent of the GPL, so he couldn’t let a chance slip by to talk about it. He summed it up as embodying three basic freedoms; freedom to use the software for any purpose, freedom to modify the software, and freedom to redistribute the software. However, just because it’s free doesn’t mean you can’t make money with it. To punctuate his point, he welcomed to the stage Alex King, who runs Crowd Favorite. Crowd Favorite now has eight full time staff in Denver and WordPress development and support is their primary revenue stream.

Speaking of the GPL, one of those nuggets of info that I talked about was relating to the WordPress.org themes repository. Matt talked about the fact that WordPress.org would be featuring free GPL themes that offer paid commercial support, which he sees as perfectly in line with the essence of the GPL (and I agree). He stressed that they wouldn’t be selling themes, but that they would support people who offer paid support for their themes. Nothing was mentioned about the plugins directory, but I can only hope (and assume) that the same support will be extended to plugin authors.

I don’t want this post to be a pedestal for preaching about the GPL, but I would like to take the time to say that I really appreciate Automattic’s support of the GPL. Their support is aggressive, dogged, and yet open minded. Just because the GPL offers certain freedoms that we all want, doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t be able to build a business around it. In the end we can all benefit.

Related Posts:

• State of the Word from WordCamp – Part 2
• Google's Matt Cutts on WordPress
• Why BuddyPress
• WordCamp San Francisco 2009
• WordCamp San Francisco 2009