Have you heard?

Dave of ThinkDave.com  summed it up the best:

1. Bill Erikson sent out a Tweet explaining that WordPress had dropped him as a developer because he suppports Thesis (they feel Thesis violates the GPL).
2. A bored 12-year old in Elbonia injected some malicious code into the Thesis 1.7 and 1.8 Beta releases, so that anyone installing the theme from these downloads got infected. It’s fixed now
3. Matt smacked Chris across the face with a wet fish, suggesting he doesn’t know how to code (how many times has a WordPress site been hacked, Matt?)
4. Chris shouted at Matt for an hour on Mixergy.
5. Matt sounded bored, like he was reading from a script his lawyers prepared.
6. Chris challenged Matt to a duel in the highest court in the land.
7. Matt said he might just do that.
8. Andrew Warner gave up trying to convince (a) Chris to go GPL with Thesis, and (b) Matt to leave Chris alone.
9. #thesiswp trended on Twitter and everybody from me to a dodgy affiliate in Delhi chimed in with an opinion that at the end of the day, doesn’t matter one little bit. Even so:  [Read the rest of Dave's Post here]

For those panicking about their Thesis Installation

Nothing to fear – this could all fizzle away or land in courts for years on end.  WordPress isn’t about to stop Thesis from working, nor could they according to their own license.  And Thesis isn’t about to just leave WordPress – they can’t.  So things are pretty well stuck for the time being.  Your Thesis-ified sites are safe.

What is the GPL and why the fuss?

It is my understanding that the GNU GPL (General Public License) basically says that the source code of whatever you create must be available, and it is your choice whether you sell or give away your creation.  The only restriction is that the GPL is passed on with any copies or derivative works.

WordPress’s position is that any theme or plugin created for WordPress is a derivative work and therefore MUST be licensed by the GPL as well.

Chris Pearson, and Thesis’ position is that his creation is not derivative and he can license it any way he pleases.  And he pleases to make money.  (As do we all!)

This is a problem, because Matt Mullenweg sees this contradiction as unethical and stunting the growth of the open source community by ‘taking away’ the thesis code from the GPL.

Whats with all the testosterone?

It has become a bit of a pi$$ing match, because Chris Pearson is a bit of a hot head.  And I mean that in the nicest way, but seriously?  I dont follow him on twitter any longer because he was making remarks years ago ‘in good fun’ that were just infuriating me.  But I digress…

How do our themes measure up?

Unless otherwise requested, we use StudioPress themes as our preferred framework.  They are licensed by the GPL in accordance with WordPress’s official position on their licensing.  Studio Press offers their framework and themes for a fee.  Under the GPL, I am free to just take that code, and give it away from my site here.  The only restriction is that it contain a copy of the GPL as well.

Our themes?  The majority of each theme is released under the GPL, because we use StudioPress, and as such, we are required to license our derivative works the same way.  So theoretically, you could take what you purchase from DSWP, post it on your site, and let people take it – as long as they maintain the GPL on it.

The Exception to the Rule

The only thing that I can license separately are the images that we create and the css files that are separate css files from the StudioPress themes.  So it gets a bit technical.  But anyhow, it doesn’t really make a difference if I slap on a different license, most people want me to do that work for them, and each website to be customized to their specifications.

Strictly, Cathy Speaking

I suppose I’m old school, or I simply don’t understand the ‘freedom’ the GPL offers, but I’m a fan of traditional business models –  you do GREAT work, and then people will pay for it.  You do exceptional work, and people will pay more. You have great customer service, people will tell their friends.   Seems kind of straight forward to me.

So you want a StudioPress theme for free?

You wont get it here.  Sorry.

I will only distribute their GPL themes with my own modifications for a fee, and (regrettably) under the GPL license.  Once it is yours, you are free to do with it as you please, except for the images and css files.   But all my fabulous clients, value the theme that they have paid top dollar for, and will keep it locked away to be safely on display on their site alone.

The Trends for the Future

If Matt and the GNU GPL folks get their way, software will become more and more open-source.   It will be available for the good of everybody, where anybody can contribute to create the best possible experience for the end user. The thing that you can’t package and license is the technical support.  More and more, developers are offering technical support as a service, either packaged with a software product or alone.  And for me, that is the most exciting part.

The exciting thing about WordPress is that for the life of your website, it can now be upgraded with the click of a button, extended with plugins, and content created by yourself.  It brings website development into the hands of the everyday internet user.  And where those users need an extra hand or dont want to be bothered with their own website, we are always here to assist in any way we can.

Good Reads this Sunday

Finally a pretty to-do list & project manager in one

Thymer Task Manager

I’m happy to report that Desperately Seeking WordPress has been growing this year again thanks to wonderful hard-working clients like yourselves.  Along the way, we’ve experienced the usual growing pains and some mountains (at least they felt like it to me)!   Last week, I discussed my mountain with Kelly Hancock from Faithful Provision.  Just talking about my challenges (in the form of business processes), helped me to realize I needed some project management software.   Gmail, google docs, and Toggl weren’t cutting it any longer. (See the interview with Kelly.)

I’m very happy to announce our partnership with Thymer.   If you’re looking for some help getting organized Thymer has offered 10% off for our community with the code DSWP.

WordPress Weekly Review

WordPress Logo

WordPress 3.0 is out.  Read my recommendations and cautions for upgrading at “Should you upgrade right away or wait a bit?”

An explanation of all the new features with snippets for you to copy/paste into your theme from Six Revisions.

Prettier Buttons for Affiliates!

Desperately Seeking WordPress

I have pretty buttons for Desperately Seeking WP to replace the brown/orange ones.  If you have my button on your blog, I’d encourage you to change it to my new and improved logo!   I really appreciate each and every one of you who spreads a good word about me!  (I have to fill up my new project manager!)

Here’s the code for you to copy:

 <a href="http://desperatelyseekingwp.com" title="Desperately Seeking WordPress"><img src="http://i284.photobucket.com/albums/ll40/o2cathy/logo-square.gif" title="Desperately Seeking WordPress" alt="Desperately Seeking WordPress" width=200 height=200 /></a>

Specials for July

Consultations are over 50% off for the month of July – find out if a new design (or ANY purchase) is worth the money!   Consultations include in depth discussions on the following topics:

• goals for the coming month, year, and long term
• your audience
• analysis of website’s current effectiveness
• brainstorming new ways of reaching your audience and/or increasing readership
• tailored recommendations for new growth

The consultation discount code is in the newsletter for July – and so is an exciting announcement!!   If you want to receive the newsletter sign up in the left hand sidebar right away!  The July newsletter will be out mid-week.

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Looking for someone to build your clients’ websites?  Turn your design into a WordPress site?  Or just take care of all the techie stuff for you?  Submit a Request for Quote.

Kelly (Faithful Provisions)

This is longer than I usually post, but I know a lot of us are currently trying to organize our summer schedules around children.  I think you’ll really get a lot from reading how Kelly manages her time so well.

How do you do all these things and work online full time?

This is how Kelly and her husband find balance.

Kelly Hancock (Faithful Provisions):   We have 2 blogs that are our full time biz and now possibly a new joint venture I am working on with some bloggers, plus I have 2 kids at home and we are going to homeschool this fall.
I know…. I am CRAZY!

Cathy Tibbles:  Thats 3 full time jobs! Never mind being YOU or a wife.

Kelly Hancock (Faithful Provisions):   Yes, I know! Sometimes I prefer being me, mom and wife.

Cathy Tibbles:  I think I’ll have to start worrying about you!

Kelly Hancock (Faithful Provisions):   Oh, I am doing much better at balance.   I used to be terrible, but once I got two VA’s[virtual assistants], my life has been wonderful!  Plus, my husband and I work here together.   He is a big help with the house and kiddos.  We share all our responsibilities.

What tools and resources do you use?

Cathy Tibbles:  Do you have a system that works for you with to-do items and follow-up on email?

Kelly Hancock (Faithful Provisions):    Everything that needs to be done, stays in an “unread” status until I complete it. Are you on gmail?

Cathy Tibbles:  Yes, I love gmail!

Kelly Hancock (Faithful Provisions):    I use the “task” function too in gmail calendar.
I have separate calendars for each part of my biz. For instance, I have a family calendar, a FP Free Events (for blog) a NP Free Events. A Posting Schedule Calendar. I have a calendar for my VA’s etc.
I post followup tasks in my calendar, it sends me an email when it is due.

Cathy Tibbles:   I’m ALL ears.

Kelly Hancock (Faithful Provisions):    So, for instance, I am reading my emails. and I have something I need to do in it, but the kids are at my feet and I dont’ want to forget, I set as “unread” or I archive and set a task. For me the key to “feeling” organized and productive is keeping a small inbox. IF I can put things on my calendar, adn task lists, and archive, archive, arvhive, I feel like a million bucks and am so much more productive.

Does that make sense?

Cathy Tibbles:  Totally.

Kelly Hancock (Faithful Provisions):    That works for me.  But…. don’t schedule TOO many tasks. Make it manageable. Feeling productive is the key.

Cathy Tibbles:   Right.

Kelly Hancock (Faithful Provisions):    I don’t put more than two items on per day.

Cathy Tibbles:   I only keep one or two projects – like you – something that helps me FEEL on top of it! lol My hubby would fall over if he heard me talk like this.  lol

Kelly Hancock (Faithful Provisions):   Oh, I know.

Cathy Tibbles:  We dont care if we ARE organized, we only want to FEEL like we are.  :D

Kelly Hancock (Faithful Provisions):   Yes, seriously! That is the key, the way you feel is critical.

Cathy Tibbles:  Ok.

What have you learned about prioritizing?

Kelly is explaining a concept a friend shared with her:

Kelly Hancock (Faithful Provisions):     Basically her concept to me was each day you have one task that MUST be done and that is your priority, have it on a white board in your office. You take 10 minutes with your biz partner to review the day or week you are having.

Then each quarter you spend 1/2 a day planning for the next quarter. Then each 6 months you spend 1 day planning. Then when you do your yearly planning, goal setting etc you take 1-3 days retreat. So, the idea is you take time to plan and get organized proprotionally to what you are planning for.

We do a retreat 2x’s per year, my hubs and I do. A biz retreat, and we work on our biz plan, financials, direction, family goals, homeschooling. We map out what and how we will function for the next year or 6 months.

Those plans ALWAYS change, so then every 3 months we will reevaluate the plan using a few hours or half day together to get back on track…

Each week on Friday or Sunday, we have a 15-30  minute planning session on priorities, and schedules.

This is VERY helpful.

When we did our planning retreat, we went over our biz plan, a made a laundry list of to-do’s.  We prioritized according to what would make us money and use less time doing it.

IF we were doing things that brought no revenue, we ditched them.

We focused on our money makers, or things that would drive traffic for us.

That is how I hired two VA’s to help me, and what has led to hiring you.

It is cheaper for me to hire you to do my tech and trouble shooting that to spend all the time figuring it out myself.

I need to spend my time, focusing on content to drive pageviews for my site, handling ad promotions, etc.

Cathy Tibbles:   And the key is that you KNOW how much your time is worth now.

Kelly Hancock (Faithful Provisions):    Yes!  I was spreading myself thin and my family was paying for it. A happy and balanced family life is the key I think to success. You need to work smart, not more.

How do you schedule family time?

Kelly Hancock (Faithful Provisions):     I also am trying to get better at having “no computer” times.  5-8pm is no computer time for me unless somthing urgent comes up.

Cathy Tibbles:   Oh yeah, me too.

Kelly Hancock (Faithful Provisions):     I also give the kids my full attention from 8-1 each day

Cathy Tibbles:  WOW – that is a LOT of time!

Kelly Hancock (Faithful Provisions):    I work around them, because I quit my corporate job to stay home with them, I am defeating the purpose if I don’t love on them!  ya know? I used to do my morning quite time online as an ITunes thing. But, I was getting distracted with the computer.  So I only do book studies now.

Cathy Tibbles:  nodding… I totally understand!

Kelly Hancock (Faithful Provisions):    So, I would recommend you might even want to sit and write a detailed list of all you have to do, and prioritize it. Then plug it into your calendar according to priority, revenue and time available. Forget about the things that aren’t important….. unless it is my project!  LOL, just kidding!

Cathy Tibbles:   THANK you for your time!!

The Symptoms of using the wrong permalink structure

This becomes a problem as your site grows. The more Pages you add, the more visitors you get, the more resources your site will use. If your site needs more resources than your host currently allows, your site will freeze, crash, and could even be suspended.

What problems can a postname permalink cause?

If you have %postname% permalinks (or category or tag or author) WordPress activates “verbose rewrite urls” (see this article for a more thorough explanation: http://ottopress.com/2010/category-in-permalinks-considered-harmful/)

Simple explanation of the Cause

custom permalink structure %postname% + many Pages (capital “P” for a Page, not a post)

How to Fix the Permalink Structure

Change the permalink to blog/$postname%/ (or any other static word like “articles” or dynamic date like %year%)

Frequently Asked Questions

What will happen to post urls?

Oddly enough it is the POSTS’s urls that will change – NOT the Pages’ urls. For example, Http://myblog.com/this-is-my-post will become http://myblog.com/blog/this-is-my-post (or http://myblog.com/2010/this-is-my-post).

What will happen to Page urls

- nothing (same with category, tag, or author pages)

Is there another SEO -favorable permalink structure?

We’ve been told lately that the way we SHOULD set up our blogs is %postname%. I, along with many others believe this isn’t the case. Perhaps once it was – but I doubt it will affect the google ranking too much to have the year or ‘blog’ word in the url.

Others say that your use of correct markup is more important ie: using “headers” from the drop-down menu in the text editor. And it seems to make sense – the more correct your mark up is, the easier for search engine spiders to crawl the site. So use headers, titles on your links and images, and your SEO will improve (if you dont already do that). But, SEO is not really a science yet – google does not hand over their algorithm for ranking sites. And it is constantly evolving and getting better at beating the tricksters. So its all a guess! Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.

Why-why-why?

Ever wonder why WP doesn’t suggest the %postname% permalink? ~ you have to write it yourself under “custom” structure. It is not recommended for good reason – those folks know how WordPress will process all those links, and they know that if you select that permalink structure you’re in for trouble. It is beyond the scope of this post to explain why, but the only way for WP to handle your permalinks in those four cases(postname, author, category or tag) is to use “verbose rewrite rules”.

What are Verbose Rewrite Rules and why do I care?

If you have your permalinks set to postname, author, tag or category you will trigger verbose rewrite rules. For other permalink structures the entire site’s rewrite rules are composed of about 10 lines of code. With a verbose rewrite rules triggered, every Page on your site needs its own list of rules (approx 11 lines). If you have less than 50 WP Pages, it isn’t a noticeable problem. If you have approx. 50 or more WP Pages, this creates a problem for the server – and you’ll need your own VPS or dedicated server (at a high cost) to be able to process all of these urls.

For more information – ask questions in the forums, or purchase a help ticket.

Usually, I’m not much of a risk taker, I’m not on the bleeding edge of anything much less technology.  However, with WordPress 3.0 I’m 99% sure it is stable enough for ALL my clients to upgrade.

I’ll wait while you do that.

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What to expect with WordPress 3.0

Now.  Before  you send me an email saying, “Cathy! Something’s wrong – nothing happened!”, let me tell you – nothing will happen.  Small things in the WordPress Administration like:

• extra tabs under the side panels
• “site” instead of “blog” label in the settings
• an extra widget or two
• and help menus in each screen

will happen, but you may not notice them right away.  Are you using the grey admin theme?  You’ll notice a few tweaks to the color theme and icons.

The important changes in WordPress 3.0

Fortunately I don’t think this new version will mean anything except a few improvements for you.  Unless you are using a theme framework – those like Thematic, Thesis and Genesis.  When you see the “This theme has an upgrade available” notice running along the top of your back-end, CLICK IT*!  That is when the cool stuff happens.

IF your theme supports it – you will see these WordPress 3.0 Features:

• “Get shortlink” button on every post
• The editor now looks like the front end of the site!!! (There aren’t enough exclamation marks to punctuate this.)
• updates to your theme are now available (if supplied by the theme author) with a click
• navigation menus are now configured using an easy drag-and-drop interface

I’ve updated my blogs, and several more today – and its all going smoothly.  As I said, there will be no learning curve to this version, and nothing that should require hard liquor.

Enjoy!

* IF you are using Thesis or Genesis or another framework, and the theme author made edits to the CORE FILES, you will BREAK YOUR SITE if you upgrade!  If you don’t know what this means, PLEASE contact the theme author/designer before you upgrade the theme!

PS – More In-depth Discussion of WordPress 3.0 at DSWP Hacks

I’ve started a new blog DSWP Hacks, where I’ll post all my thoughts on the new taxonomies and post types – and where I’m using the new default theme – Twenty Ten.  DSWP Hacks is rated GX. (Geek Xtreme)

You may enjoy these as well:

• SEO for WordPress via Plugins (including 6 month update since this post was published)
• Essential Plugins for a New WordPress Installation
• How to Place your Contextual Ads

Join us every Sunday for light reading from the Technology Sector.

Good Reads this Sunday

For Keeping Up

They say WordPress 3.0 will be released tomorrow.  This will mean very little to the every day blogger.  The version you have (hopefully 2.9.2) is fully secure.  My advice is to wait a week or two before upgrading.  In that week or two do not upgrade any plugins!

The beneficial pieces of the new WordPress release are:

• drag and drop menu system (similar to widgets)
• new default theme (very nice!)
• light admin user interface upgrades
• easier upgrading of themes (similar to plugins)
• if you are using an enabled-theme this version also makes it possible to see in the editing screen exactly what you see once published

Now Open:  The Peer Referral Directory

I know a tailor.

With much ado, I’m declaring the Peer Referral Directory open! Be sure to check your ad for errors or omissions, and let me know via email so we can fix it!.

The Desperately Seeking WordPress Help Forums

Which way do we go?

The Desperately Seeking WordPress forums are beginning to come alive with posts. We are in the process of transferring many of the questions-via-email to the forums to benefit everyone. If you have access to the client center (e.g. you are a client) you also have an account created for you at the Forums.  The username is still your email address, and the password remains the same.

Chocolate & Garlic – a Hidden Gem

Pmom as she calls herself, has a wonderful hidden gem of a blog at Chocolate and Garlic.  It is unpretentious, sweet, heart-felt, and oh-so-real.  I think you’ll enjoy her!

Blogger Coming Out Package – June ONLY

And that means only 2 more weeks to take advantage of the June Coming Out Party Package at 40% off!  See the details at the Blogger Coming Out Package.