sitepoint

By Jeffro on September 4, 2009

The folks over at Sitepoint.com have released episode 25 of their podcast which features an interview with Matt Mullenweg. The interview contains news and tidbits related to WordPress development, some hints as to what we can look forward to in WordPress 2.9, three major issues that are bouncing around Matts head and more. In fact, Brad even asked Matt a question dealing with Commercial plugins and the repository, something I wrote about yesterday and continues to be talked about. The following is from the Sitepoint Transcript of the interview. I apologize for the large quote but this covers this specific point in the interview.

Brad: Yeah, actually I have been getting involved in WordPress. I would say I guess I’m one of the people I’m talking about. I work more on the WordPress side than I do MU but you’re right, I probably should be more MU involved.

I want to talk about WordPress.org a little bit, the actual web site. Now I know recently you released or you launched the commercial themes page. It got a lot of press, a lot of buzz, a lot of people talking and I think it’s a great feature, and I think that was kind of the general consensus. Are there any plans to do the same for plug-ins and have a commercial plug-in section that essentially just kind of promotes those commercial plug-ins that are GPL compliant?

Matt: Probably not in the near term. Honestly, there’s not that many people asking for it. It’s really just been like one or two people and they’re asking a lot but it’s not that many in terms of number of folks versus the themes page where there is a ton of folks… I think themes are a little bit different from plug-ins in terms that… a theme is more like the basis for designing your web site and it’s kind of the building block, where a plug-in is often just one smaller part of it. So honestly I feel like there’s a better commercial case for themes than there is for plug-ins.

Brad: Yeah, I would agree. That was actually the follow up I had to that is it feels like that’s kind of the mindset of everyone, that commercial themes are accepted and kind of understood by the community; whereas commercial plug-ins are almost frowned upon. If I were to release a plug-in and charge for it, more people would almost probably tell me that I shouldn’t do that, even if it’s still GPL compliant.

Matt: And it would also be more likely that someone would create a good free alternative, where with design that’s less likely to happen.

Brad: That’s exactly right. Maybe I’m the same way, I come across a plug-in that costs money and chances are you’re right, there is a free alternative out there that’s going to do something similar or very close to that functionality.

Matt: Most features for WordPress start as plug-ins first. So if all plug-ins were to be commercial, that would seriously inhibit because even though they’d be GPL, the guys obviously would want us to put functionality in WordPress and that would seriously inhibit, I think, the growth of WordPress.

Brad: Some plug-ins warrant a price tag, some of the more complex e-commerce forms, things like that… those plug-ins if you look at the source behind them, there’s a lot of work that has been put into plug-ins.

Matt: It’s not a function though of the amount of work because obviously there’s a lot of amount of work put into WordPress.

Brad: True. That’s a very good point and ultimately, it’s everyone’s decision on how they want to release that. I’m a big…

Matt: I like to say that best things in life are free.

Brad: Hey, WordPress is a great example of that. I’m a big fan of GPL and I like to see things that released GPL. I really don’t have a problem if people pay or ask for money for certain things.

Matt: Also, if you look at the direction of the commercial theme page, they’re not really charging for the downloads, less and less; they’re more charging for the support and the customization and work around it. I think plug-ins totally can go that direction as well.

Brad: Yeah, that’s actually a great business model and I know a few plug-ins like that that go that way. I think the e-commerce plug-in is one of them. The download is completely free and then if you want support, you pay for that. I think that’s probably a good business model for plug-in developers to look towards.

Overall, a good interview conducted by Brad Williams.

SitePoint bbPress Theme Community Project

By Jeffro on August 3, 2009

This is a guest blog post written by Ryan Hellyer, who operates PixoPoint.com. While you’re there, check out his WordPress Menu Plugin

I’m involved with the development of a new bbPress theme. This in itself would not normally be particularly interesting, people develop new themes for forums all the time. However this is a theme with a difference!

My first forway into theming for bbPress was during an episode of WordPress Weekly when Jeff Chandler said that bbPress was not up to scratch for use as the WP Tavern forum software. He cited the shear number of plugins that needed to be installed to achieve very basic functionality as reason for not using it. As a proof of concept, I installed plugins which were capable of achieving almost all of the functionality Jeff asked for during the hour long show. However, even though these plugins were capable of adding the functionality required and were very easy to implement, they often didn’t do it in a fashion suitable for all themes. For users to style their forum the way they wanted it to, they would need to have modified those core plugins and in turn prevent them from being upgradeable.

Later on I messed around with building a template generator for bbPress. I didn’t have time to build a custom theme from scratch, so I simply modified the default Kakumei theme which came with bbPress. Unfortunately the Kakumei theme uses some odd-ball coding techniques which did not gel well with my own code. I needed a theme which was coded to modern standards and without using strange positioning methods to place things onto the screen. I hacked at the code I was using, but even now the themes exported from the bbPress template generator contain many annoying coding bugs.

What did become apparent to me at the time though, was that bbPress was actually more powerful for the average developer than any other forum software out there. If any of you have ever tried coding a new forum theme from scratch you will be able to testify to the fact that they are almost always extraordinarily difficult to work with. In fact they are so complicated that most forum softwares never have any custom themes made for them, they are almost always knock off’s of the default theme. bbPress on the other hand is a dream to work with. The number of template files is low and the ones provided with Kakumei are fairly well laid out and so are easy to find your way around.

I seriously contemplated building a custom bbPress theme, but after taking a serious look at the way that WordPress itself is developing into the most popular web based software of all time, I decided that the best approach to changing the way that themes are built would be to use the same approach used by bbPress’s cousin WordPress. With WordPress, there is a bustling industry of themers churning out designs, new code, new techniques etc. all of the time. WordPress themers across the world are constantly borrowing code from one another in an attempt to stay ahead of the race to create the best theme around.

The competitive themeing industry that WordPress has is not present in any forum software. Creating this sort of competition myself would be impossible as all I could do is to compete with myself (pointless). So after some thought, I decided that the best approach to tackle this problem head on is to create a community of developers who can contribute back to a single theme project each in a small way. Experts from there respective areas will be able to contribute to the areas of themeing which they are best at – HTML/CSS coders can handle the markup/CSS, programmers can handle any custom PHP, javascript experts can handle writing any client side coding used and graphic designers and usability/accessibility experts can contribute to the overall design. This way, although there is no competition necessarily, each section will be contributed to by experts in that particular area of development.

We are running the project over at SitePoint.com where the SitePoint staff (including myself) are organizing a community wide development of the new theme. At this stage the community are working out the basic wireframe/UI side of things before moving on to the design and coding of the theme. If you would like to be involved, please sign up at SitePoint and join in the conversation, we are very keen to get as much input as possible on the new project.

I don’t know of any projects which have been organized in a similar fashion to this. It may not work as expected, but it should be a fun learning experience none the less. I look forward to seeing your input over at SitePoint :)

More information is available in the “SitePoint bbPress theme community project Announcement Post“.