GPL Themes Get Some Love, Plugins Suffer?
Matt Mullenweg asked the Software Freedom Law Center whether WordPress Themes are GPL too. One sentence summary: PHP in WordPress themes must be GPL, artwork and CSS may be but are not required.
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.
Improve Performance of Your WordPress Theme in 5 Minutes
There’s a quick and relatively simple way to increase the performance of your WordPress theme while reducing overall server load. The problem is that most themes are written to be as portable as possible. This comes in handy because you can just drop in a theme and it works with no editing at all. Unfortunately, it means that a lot of information that never changes is queried from the database anyway. If you want to speed your theme up, you can customize it to your site and reduce database queries. All in about 5 minutes.
Free Template: Minimalist
Minimalist is an extremely light weight, configurable template, with no images at all! It’s completely fluid, so no matter what the user’s screen width, you don’t waste any space, browser font resizing is completely supported, and it is source-ordered. It includes stylesheets to display main content on the left or right, as well as many alternative colors including grey, green, blue, purple, red, and brown! It validates as XHTML Strict 1.0, and is released as Public Domain. It is available for download over at OpenDesigns.org.
I just converted Minimalist to a WordPress theme, and uploaded it here for anyone that wants it. I was lazy, so it defaults to green/grey with content to the left. If you want to use a different combination, edit the header.php file to use whatever css files you want (all are included). I also included a contact page template, but again was a little lazy, so you will need to edit contact.php and put your contact info on lines 73-75, as well as your E-Mail address on line 17. The only other real changes that were made was styling for comments (as well as unique styling for admin comments), and I added a pencil icon to use for “editing” (it’s still image free for your users).
