Ergebnisse

Archive for the ‘wordpress’ Category

Is it legally and/or eth­i­cally okay, to build a busi­ness based on a GPL licensed soft­ware? To those of you unfa­mil­iar with the not-so-uncomplicated details of open and com­mer­cial licens­ing, this ques­tion may sound like a ques­tion you’d ask a stu­dent of media law. But the­ory turns into vir­tual real­ity when we take a closer look a The­sis, a very pop­u­lar Word­Press theme.

Unlike most themes, The­sis isn’t avail­able for free. Christ Pear­son is sell­ing his tem­plate for $87 per per­sonal site, and so he’s been rack­ing up sales. Why do peo­ple pay for The­sis when there are so many free themes avail­able? This ques­tion is a lot eas­ier to answer: Chris thought about what pro cus­tomers want and started to offer a flex­i­ble, highly con­fig­urable theme which caters almost every need of pro­fes­sional pub­lish­ers and pro-bloggers. But even though his sales fig­ures are sky­rock­et­ing, Matt Mul­len­weg, founder and head of WordPress.com/.org argues that The­sis vio­lates the GPL license — because GPL-software not only is freely avail­able (in source code), but the GPL (Gnu Pub­lic Licenses) also states that all prod­ucts built upon GPL soft­ware must also use the same license. In other words: It’s ille­gal to make money on the hard (and free) work of others.

Today mixergy.com invited Chris and Matt for a Skype dis­cus­sion which cov­ers some very impor­tant aspects of soft­ware licensing:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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Today, the Word­Press team released the long-awaited ver­sion 3.0 — the third major release of our favorite blog­ging cms comes with a ton of extremely cool new fea­tures: Word­Press and WP-MU haven been com­pletely merged, which means that you can now run an unlim­ited num­ber of blogs from the same instal­la­tion. Also, the infa­mous Kubrick theme finally retires and gets replaced by Twenty Ten. Of course the new stan­dard tem­plate proudly shows off all the new bells and whis­tles, includ­ing a greatly improved han­dling of menus, post types and tax­onomies. The back­end inter­face has become a lot lighter, 218 pro­gram­mers con­tributed 1.217 bug fixes and fea­ture enhance­ments. Check out the video tour posted on the offi­cial Word­Press blog: Read the rest of this entry »

Last Week Matt Mul­len­weg announced on his blog, that the upcom­ing Word­Press 3.0 ver­sion drop the sup­port for the JPEG file for­mat. Increas­ing license costs and Microsoft’s announce­ment to include SVG sup­port in Inter­net Explorer 9 were the main rea­sons for this decision:

With the upcom­ing Inter­net Explorer 9 there is no more need for jpg — Microsoft finally embraces the SVG stan­dard, thus help­ing to make the web a much more open place. JPEG does have some advan­tages, but they are sim­ply out-weighed by the license costs.

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Word­Press offers a fas­ci­nat­ingly wide range of options: thanks to the power and the cre­ativ­ity of the open source com­mu­nity, the world’s most pop­u­lar CMS has devel­oped from a “blog-only” prod­uct into a mul­ti­fac­eted plat­form. Hun­dreds of plu­g­ins are wait­ing to cater almost every web publisher’s needs. These days, two new plu­g­ins take Word­Press to the next level by inte­grated elab­o­rate social net­work fea­tures. Bud­dy­Press is now avail­able at ver­sion 1.2 which plays along well with stan­dard WP-installations; the pre­vi­ous ver­sion required WP multi­user edi­tion. And then there’s Min­gle, a new bril­liant exten­sion by Blair Williams, author of the (genius!) Pret­tyLink plugin.

Even though both plu­g­ins offer sim­i­lar func­tion­al­i­ties, they take a com­pletely dif­fer­ent approach at turn­ing Word­Press into a social net­work. While Bud­dy­Press aims at run­ning a stand-alone social net­work site, Min­gle extends the com­mu­nity capa­bil­i­ties of nay exist­ing blog. I installed it here on datadirt yes­ter­day. Curi­ous for a test-drive? Just click the new link Pro­file in the main menu! In the fol­low­ing post­ing I’ll explain why extend­ing a blog with social net­work fea­tures is gen­er­ally a smart idea. Read the rest of this entry »

Word­Press 2.9 is still quite fresh, but today the team released a new ver­sion includ­ing some minor bug fixes. Word­Press 2.9.1 fixes scheduling-errors which occurred on some hosts. The update can either be trig­gered via the admin or you can upload the files via ftp, no data­base update nec­es­sary this time.

But there’s another plugin-related issue: since the upgrade to 2.9, many Word­Press blog­gers miss Sim­ple Tags: the tag man­age­ment plu­gin just stopped to work, but worry not: it’s just a hard-coded ver­sion check, a sim­ple hack makes the plu­gin work again. Read the rest of this entry »

On Tues­day night, the orga­niz­ers took us to a great tra­di­tional Roman­ian restau­rant where I real­ized that one of my favorite non-beef foods, namely “Sar­male” (cab­bage rolls filled with a spe­cial kind of cured meat), is a national dish here in Roma­nia. We also got to watch a group of dancers and we even engaged actively in the action (poorly though, at least in my case :). Later that night we vis­ited Planter’s club later. I must admit that get­ting up at 7 on Wednes­day was quite tough, but as soon as the first ses­sion began, the fatigue van­ished in an instant. Read the rest of this entry »

The first day of the World Blog­ging Forum 2009 was all about empow­er­ment and influ­ence: since 99% of the par­tic­i­pants are blog­gers it’s no sur­prise that we all agree on the total and com­plete dead­ness of old media — that’s just a ques­tion of the van­ish­ing point. But how to har­ness the power of the web to strengthen the civil soci­ety in dic­ta­to­r­ial states? This issue is far from easy to tackle! Read the rest of this entry »

This post­ing is also avail­able in Ger­man.

Just before I took off to Andalu­sia I got mail from Mihaela, ask­ing if I wanted to attend the World Blog­ging Forum 2009 in Roma­nia as a VIP guest. Yes of course! Flight and hotel room are already booked and I’m look­ing for­ward to a con­fer­ence a lot! The guest– and speaker-list con­tains a lot of pop­u­lar blog­gers who I’m glad to meet face to face, plus it’s the first time I’m going to visit Bucharest. The orga­niz­ers have invited the most suc­cess­ful blog­gers from 30 coun­tries to Roma­nia to dis­cuss the “ideas for a bet­ter dig­i­tal world”:

The most influ­en­tial blog­gers in the world: The event brings together some of the most influ­en­tial per­sons in the online media all around the world, in con­fer­ences and work­shops aim­ing to estab­lish clear para­me­ters of the devel­op­ment of the online media.

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Yes­ter­day the Word­Press Team released the offi­cial roadmap ver­sion 2.8, named after Jazz musi­cian Chet Baker. Thanks to the update engine most web­mas­ters should be able to do the update via CMS — but of course it’s always a good idea to start with a com­plete Back­ups. The High­lights of the new ver­sion are the improved wid­get– and template-interfaces, plus there’s syn­tax high­light­ing for edit­ing tem­plates via the back­end. Read the rest of this entry »

Widget-enabled themes are a good thing, Martha Stew­art would prob­a­bly say — and right­fully so. Con­fig­ur­ing one’s side­bar directly via CMS and drag-and-drop is doubtlessly a nifty fea­ture we blog­gers don’t want to miss. To kick things up a notch, Word­Press allows for an infi­nite num­ber of dif­fer­ent Side­bars. This comes in very handy for putting dif­fer­ent side­bar con­tents on the blog home­page, the sin­gle post­ings and the sta­tic pages. But most blog­gers who start exper­i­ment­ing with mul­ti­ple side­bars expe­ri­ence a major draw-back: most plu­g­ins can only be used in one side­bar exclu­sively. Read the rest of this entry »

One week ago, Automat­tic launched a brand-new WordPress-centered video site: WordPress.tv fea­tures var­i­ous screen casts, pre­sen­ta­tions and tuto­r­ial videos on the world’s lead­ing blog con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem. The avail­able clips are bound to water the mouths of begin­ners and pros, as they range from basic expla­na­tions like “How to post a blog entry” to all the advanced pre­sen­ta­tions held dur­ing last year’s Word­Camp. Read the rest of this entry »