I guess today can be considered “National Declaration of what Matt, WordPress et all thinks about it Day”. You can read all about the legality of the GPL license and how WordPress themes are affected.

For those lazy folk, here’s the meat:

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

There you have it.

It seems that even before the posting of the response that Matt was given from the Software Freedom Law Center, other developers such as iThemes and WooThemes had already decided it was wise to move their licenses over to the GPL.

And as Matt puts it, WordPress has chosen to celebrate those who are developing GPL themes with a brand new Commercially Supported WordPress Theme page. Which, of course is a follow through to a promise that Matt made nearly a year ago.

This also clearly illustrates Matt’s view that people can (and will be endorsed if they do it with the GPL License) make money using WordPress.

For those of you who follow me on Twitter this won’t come as a surprise to you – but for those who don’t, this morning I discovered a major premium theme affiliate program fraud ring.

I hate to say that it’s been happening for months – I won’t go into all of the details regarding the situation, but what I can say is that I’m glad I found it. This really isn’t the reason why I’m writing the post, so please let’s keep any discussion to what you read below.

Within seconds after realizing what was going on, my reaction wasn’t to contact my wife, my son, my parents or any of my local friends – I contacted a few other people first.

It was Cory from iThemes, Jason from Press75, Adii from Woo Themes and Brian & Chris from Thesis.

While chatting with Jason this morning about the ordeal, we started talking about feeling the “WordPress love” we have for each other, and that inspired this tweet of mine:

True community amongst WordPress theme competitors isn’t cut throat – it’s sharing the wealth of info even if it helps out the “other guy”.

You might think my reaction towards the discovery of the fraud ring and how my instinct to immediately contact my competitors as being strange, but I don’t. And I truly believe that if any of the others listed above found the same thing I did, they’d be contacting me too.

That’s just how it goes… and although we might disagree with certain things or choose different business models (although not so much anymore) we have a mutual respect for each other that I think is pretty awesome. I think it shows quite a bit, because I’ve seen a number of times other folks seen as leaders in the WordPress community compliment each other on Twitter, jump to the defense of each other when we’re being attacked, and so on.

One of my favorite movies of all time is Remember the Titans – the true story of a newly appointed African-American coach and his high school team on their first season as a racially integrated unit.

Even though the premium theme designers in the WordPress community aren’t racially integrated, there’s a part in that movie that I can’t help but think as being relevant to the way I feel about the 5 guys I mentioned above.

It’s about leadership – in Remember the Titans it was referring to the team. In our world, it’s referring to the WordPress community as a whole. We are seen by many as leaders, and I find it vitally important we take that seriously. We can be in it for ourselves, or for our team.

To my friends Cory, Jason, Adii, Brian and Chris: “Strong side, left side…….”

Anyway, I won’t waste any time – I’ve started development of the Magazine theme by StudioPress, and am looking for feedback. Take it for a test drive, and let me know what you think.

Here’s a screenshot of the homepage so far, note that the tabber section is back:

Here’s a screenshot of the theme options page so far:

Now bear with me, as I promised before – I would not release the theme as it was originally designed to protect the integrity of the circumstances in which is was purchased. However, what I am proposing is to take the original theme, updated it (again) for WordPress 2.8 and restyle it so that the appearance varies from the original one.

The theme package would be made freely available to anyone who purchased the original theme at no cost. My plan is to have the theme updated for WordPress 2.8, thoroughly optimized by Joost de Valk (as all StudioPress themes will be), updated for auto-thumbnails with the TimThumb script, provide additional page templates, localized for translation for any language and then supported on the StudioPress site.

Before making any decisions, I wanted to get general feedback (both from those who purchased and anyone else with an opinion) on this. I value the WordPress community, which is why I’m asking.

Here’s a screenshot of the orginal theme for your reference:

Together we will be updating the current themes to optimize them even more for search engine optimization as well as code efficiency. We will also be preparing all StudioPress themes for internationalization. The upcoming Education theme will be the first theme to include these features.

I am personally very happy to be teaming up with a fellow GPL developer, and we have a lot of awesome things that will become a part of the StudioPress themes. Welcome Joost, to our team!

A little over a month ago I wrote a post called How to Use the WordPress Image Uploader to Create Thumbnails where Darren Hoyt (a very talent WP developer) quasi-challenged me into using the TimThumb PHP Script to automatically create thumbnails for the StudioPress themes.

I finally managed to sink my teeth into the challenge to see how the script works, and how it can be implemented into my themes. Piece of cake, and now to get dirty and update my themes to accommodate this great resource.

Anticipating a few common questions:

• Themes that will be updated are Streamline, Lifestyle, Church, Agent, Allure, Chrome (probably in that order)
• I will begin updating themes in the next few days and roll them out one by one
• Yes, I will write specific tutorials for each theme on how to update your current theme without having to start with a fresh version of the updated theme (in other words, your customizations won’t have to be redone)

Props to those involved in the development of the script – StudioPress users will really appreciate your efforts!

Anyhow, I humbly ask for your forgiveness for my lack of blogging, just been busy. Tomorrow morning I am pretty much back in action, so you’ll start to see more activity again from me… in the meantime, here’s a few things that I have planned to work on in the near future:

• Updating existing StudioPress themes with minor enhancements
• Launching two independent (from StudioPress) niche WordPress theme/community sites
• More frequent blogging/Twittering with what’s going on in my business world

Well, the reason I just rebooted is kinda silly – we all make mistakes, and I just made a big one. You see, I’ve been working on the redesign of my site, and while I was playing around in my server, I accidentally uploaded the new design’s stylesheet over my previous design’s stylesheet.

Thus, my site chucked a major wobbly, so I quickly had to activate the new theme and let it fly.

What is the moral to this story?

Either a) don’t compulsively reboot all the time, or b) MAKE BACKUPS!

I just hacked my way into his admin panel and am writing this post, and updated nicely (Perez Hilton style) his mugshot.

Some guru, can’t even keep a hacker out of his site….. what a LOSER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Now, off to destroy his StudioPress sites!!!!!!!!!

The sidebar and the footer are fully widgeted, and the navigation is coded for drop-down menus. Shades of Blue has been developed to accommodate threaded comments and sticky posts.

For those of you wondering, yes – at some point there will be more “Shades of…” themes. I have plans to develop stylesheets for additional color schemes in the near future. So go on, and check out the demo of the theme.

Below is a screenshot of the theme’s front page, styled for Sticky Posts:

Below is a screenshot of the post page, with threaded comments: