Themes News & Articles

WordPress (news, site) made a small announcement today regarding whether or not the GPL applies to themes. 

WordPress refers to the GPL as their Bill of Rights, but we like to think of it as a free software license. The GPL is a popular licence that grants the recipients of a computer program the rights of the free software definition, and uses copyleft to ensure the freedoms are preserved--even when the work is changed or added to.

Matt Mullenweg of WordPress writes, "We’ve always done our best to keep WordPress.org clean and only promote things that are completely compatible and legal with WordPress’s license." But just to be double sure, he recently consulted the Software Freedom Law Center for their opinion. Mullenweg's results were summed up on the WordPress blog in one simple line:

"PHP in WordPress themes must be GPL, artwork and CSS may be but are not required."

Of course, cutting out CSS and JavaScript from WordPress would get kind of hairy and horrible, so the final verdict from the WordPress team is that they will continue to only promote and host things on WordPress.org that are 100% GPL or compatible.

In order to recognize and celebrate a few of the folks creating 100% GPL themes as well as providing support and other services around them, WordPress has a new page listing GPL commercially supported themes here.

We've been following Zimplit from the very moment of birth of this new open source, PHP-based micro CMS venture. Then, we covered Zimplit on a number of occasions, including when the vendor released Zimplit CMS 1.1 and evolved to the point of adding inline editing capabilities.

So what is it now, you ask? Aside from the fact that the CMS designed for "normal people, not for IT gurus" grew its customer base to more than 50,000 users around the world, Zimplit (all encouraged by this kind of attention to develop further and add new features) released a set of new features to make its little mini CMS more powerful than Mini-Me.

Like many other open source CMS platforms, Drupal needs more than just standard themes available to their users. There are a number of places to find Drupal themes, including the latest offering from DrupalShark.

As with any website, design can be key to your overall performance. Many already know that WordPress offers some great features for blogs and sites alike. But did you know that you can get great magazine style themes to ensure maximum design efficiency online?

It’s that time again. Clickability time. For the third year in a row, Clickability is holding it’s User Conference May 5-7, 2008 in San Francisco. Share strategies, interact with Clickability, it’s partners and other customers. Oh and don’t forget to have a margarita or two for us!