Speaking of GPL succeses, WordPress is itself an example of monumental success. All of its developers have something to be immensely proud of. But whenever I am reminded that WordPress is GPL, my passion for it takes a bit of a dive. I’m more comfortable with the true freedom of liberally-licensed products. If a liberally-licensed blog system of equal quality, ease of use, and popularity should appear, my loyalties to WordPress would not last long.

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

This matches with what I (and many others) believed so far. Also note that the post says that WordPress.org will only promote 100% GPL or compatible themes, which I assume means that you have to GPL your CSS and images too for your theme to be accepted there.

This could be an idea if you wanted to make a new plugin: Eduardo Zulian needed a way to show a huge amount of categories in the write post admin area. Could be really useful for sites using WP as a CMS with a lot of different categories in play.

Here’s a good discussion on WordPress’ accessibility issue. And related with that discussion, Lynne Pope requested the creation of the wp-accessibility mailing list to further discuss and implement better accessibility into WordPress. Quite obviously a great idea. Let’s hope this comes into reality real soon.

…includes a mobile switcher to select themes based on the type of user that is visiting the site, a selection of mobile themes, extra widgets, device adaptation and a mobile administration panel…

I like how it provides both front-end and back-end mobile version of your WordPress. You can also check other plugins made for mobile purposes here.

So there was a post on the WP dev blog asking folks for ideas and tweaks to the Dashboard design.  Jane Wells linked to the related WordPress forum thread if you want to contribute or just follow the discussion. The 2.8 navigation design guidelines are available here.

Mike Walsh asked for plugins that can handle forms to be included with sign-up activity. TDO Mini Forms and MM Forms were recommended. A bunch of non-WordPress solutions were also suggested.

Here’s Ptah Dunbar with a code snippet on how to automatically activate certain widgets.

There’s also an on-going discussion started by Michael Toppa on how to make a plugin that loads certain CSS only on pages that use that plugin. No definitive solution so far. Any takers?

Did you know the WordPress 24-Hours Has-Patch Marathon a few days before? Here’s a little inside story of what happened in wp-hackers. Some wanted to help but couldn’t because there’s no news posted at the mailing list, and the two days prior announcement post at the WP development blog were simply too short.

Stephen Rider suggested that it is better to revert from using the word “Appearance” back to “Design” inside the Dashboard. The change to “Appearance” happened within the 2.7 redesign, which changed all the menus from verbs to nouns. “Design” is also a noun, he said, and it encompassed the content underneath that menu better: Widgets, for example, are not just appearances but also part of the design of the site. Demetris suggested using the word “Layout” instead. What do you think?

Here’s a discussion on using the WP_Query() to display posts with a certain search term.