Category: Blogging

The “Karate Kids” – Chris Pearson (Thesis) vs Matt Mullenweg (WordPress): 0-1 So Far

Picture by Daniel Larusso

Beware! This might be time consuming!

Yesterday I opened my dashboard and noticed syn-thesis-1 by Matt Mullenweg in a window – It’s a prerogative of some WordPress developers to have their posts in one of the WordPress dashboard windows.

Matt Mullenweg (@PhotoMatt) is the guy behind WordPress, the blogging platform software I use here.

Chris Pearson (@Pearsonified) is the guy behind the Thesis Theme that I use here.

Matt was referring to an audio stream of nearly an hour, kindly put together by Mixergy who tried to bring the two closer together.

To get a bit perspective and background you could consider to look at this interview of Chris by Mixergy (@AndrewWarner).

There is another connected read in a post #thesiswp by Jane Wells @Janeforshort, an Automattic member.

You can reed Tweets about it in the #thesiswp stream.

Chris “addressed” the matter without going into details of the dispute itself in an earlier post Solutions and Ideology

Unfortunately in the audio stream neither party clearly stipulates the issue.

What’s it all about?

WordPress is bound by the GNU GPL License.

Jane explained the issue to me in the comments to her post:

The uber-simple version: the WordPress license states that derivative code (based on WordPress, using WordPress core functions, etc) inherits the GPL license and must retain the user freedoms that the WordPress license guarantees. Chris uses WordPress code (in some cases directly copied and pasted from WordPress core), but is not following the rule of the WordPress license, and is instead releasing his Thesis theme under a restrictive license, which takes away the user freedoms that the WordPress license exists to guarantee. Basically, developing on WordPress has one rule by the license agreement: you can take our code for free and build on it, but any work that comes out of that and is publicly distributed must be made available for modification and redistribution just like WordPress itself. Chris doesn’t like that rule because the second part of it would allow other people to build on his work, and he doesn’t want them to be able to. So he takes advantage of the first part of the rule, and violates the second.

It is not about the money

Jane further explained:

As has been stated many times (and is in the license itself), the GPL issue comes into play with public distribution. If you create a theme for your own use and don’t distribute it at all, license isn’t an issue. If you create a work for hire for a client you should deliver the source code to them (which you do when you deliver the theme), but you do not need to append a license to it b/c you are simply delivering work for hire. Only when you engage in public distribution (make it available publicly via the web or other delivery mechanism, whether paid or free) do you need to think about the license. At that point, yes, your PHP theme code needs to be GPL, but you can license your images and CSS under whatever license you like in order to protect the intellectual property of your designs.

Why 0-1?

Listening through the audio interview with Matt I concluded Chris was angry. He wasn’t drunk as he stated somewhere on Twitter. He shouldn’t have been angry. By loosing his temper he lost it. He clearly didn’t make a cohesive case. The end of the story is that he dared Matt to sue him. I’m not sure a judge from behind his desk would be able to solve the matter in a way the community could live with.

Matt kept his calm and announced another weapon: He offers Thesis users to buy them a GPL compliant premium theme.

I might consider to take Matt up on that offer.

On another note: Is it mere coincidence that Matt chimes in after WordPress 3.0 was released that has many features and functionalities Thesis offered long before 3.0 was launched?

Update
The issue intrigues me from various points of view. Especially the fact that both characters are behaving more like trolls than sensible people.

I’m collecting some links here for further reading:

  • In themes are GPL too Matt posted a (part of?) a Software Freedom Law Center opinion on the matter already back in July 2009. Here he goes over the boundary in my view:

    • Even though graphics and CSS aren’t required to be GPL legally, the lack thereof is pretty limiting. Can you imagine WordPress without any CSS or javascript? So as before, we will only promote and host things on WordPress.org that are 100% GPL or compatible. To celebrate a few folks creating 100% GPL themes and providing support and other services around them, we have a new page listing GPL commercially supported themes.

  • WordPress Them Licensing by Ryan Boren (@Rboren), on the WP side
  • Thesis War summary by Ben Cook (@Skitzzo), on the Thesis side
  • A thoughtful article why the GPL does not affect a theme Why the GPL does not apply to Premium WordPress themes
  • A further collection of links on the subject: 32 WordPress Thesis and GPL links to help you formulate your own opinion
  • Matt Mullenweg Fouls his nest
  • @FrederickDing has a pleasantly insightful take on the matter in Tracking the ThesisWP matter

More to follow…

Paginator – Probably the best WordPress Page Navigation Plugin for the Thesis Theme

For me easy navigation of a blog is a very important part of blogging.

I’ve had a page navigation plugin here that showed the blog pages both before and after the posts that I have on a page or blog category. The problem with the plugin was that a newer version interfered on several levels with the blog and I had to keep an older version, but that older version also interfered with post editing. I really had to get rid of it and replace it with something else.

I’ve found another and clever way of page navigation: Not only via page numbers, but also via a scrolling slider. I thank Famous Bloggers Net for pointing me in the right direction. The plugin is the Paginator.

While using my prior pagination plugin I came to the conclusion that I used the top pagination much more frequent than the the bottom one. Other than Famous Bloggers does I would suggest to download the plugin via add a plugin in your WordPress dashboard and put the following code in the Thesis Hook Before Content:

< ?php if(function_exists ('wp_paginator')) {wp_paginator ();}?>

Don’t forget to check the “execute PHP on this hook” button.

Also don’t forget to put a number in the number of pages for the Paginator setting.

In this way you leave the Thesis navigation at the bottom in tact and you have a nifty navigation tool on top of your pages and categories.

Update
Probably I’m the only one that uses this feature the most on this blog. I still like it, but there is one caveat. If you are monitoring broken links with Google Webmaster tools you’ll notice the typical error that each first page does not exist…

DePhoCussing from ITB 2010 (2): About trying to Hit the Nail on the Head

This is a photo of a moving sculpture in Frankfurt of a hard working man, a smith, in front of the Frankfurter Messe in Germany. The movement of the sculpture suggests the smith hits maibe not a nail, but at least a piece of metal with his hammer. It inspired me for the title of this post. I took this photo almost 3 years ago when I visited some venue at the Frankfurter Messe.

The Marriott Connection
The hotel between the legs of the sculpture is the Frankfurter Marriott on a prime location….opposite the Franfurter Messe.

The association with this post is this: I do admire Bill Marriott who is still a hard working guy where others from his age are sitting “behind the geraniums” as we say in The Netherlands (i.e. are enjoying their retirement) while he rules his Hotel Empire. Moreover he dipped his toes into social media in January 2007 when he started his blog.

The Panel
At the March 2010 PhoCusWright@ITB conference I’ve been acting as a panelist. One of the questions we had to address was: What is the ROI of engaging in social media? I interpreted this question as how many reservations do your blog and your engagement in social media generate for your hotel? Usually I’m not very shy to act as a panelist or as a speaker, but this time I was a nervous wreck: I had said “yes” to act as a panelist and had to come up with a sensible answer and long time I was thinking Metrics Metrics Metrics. My problem is I don’t know the metrics. I had never looked at metrics. I had never thought about metrics. Even today I’m only faintly aware there are metrics available to see the conversions from tweets or from messages on your FaceBook page….but I do not know the details….
So I held to my rather professional camera with the ominous looking professional lens, marched to the floor with my fellow panelists and started taking photos from the audience… Despite the prior thorough briefing by Richard Zucker

I was totally unaware of the huge noise the clicking of my camera made. The whole bunch of techies that orchestrated the conference went berserk, because nobody else could be understood anymore. Kevin May, who moderated the panel made me graciously aware of my misbehavior. But while clicking away on stage the answer came to me and all of a sudden I was able to formulate it in a more or less comprehensible way. I would love to see the footage of that panel discussion back once.

My Answer to the ROI question:
“For me quality goes before quantity and I don’t know how to measure quality. I try to attract guests who when they know more of me and like what they see of me, also like to stay in my hotel, which is likely to enhance their experience……”

Pff saved by the bell. By the reactions of several people there and then and later when I discussed it over with several other people it stuck and they agreed and even got inspired by the idea. So I’m glad that by DePhoCussing I was able to focus on the answer that is really my answer to the question, maybe not the anticipated answer, but my answer. Another lesson was that by acting “out of the box” and taking photos of the audience instead of someone in the audience taking photos by me, I was able to attract their attention and I tend to believe my answer stuck better. I maybe even snooped away some attention from my fellow panelists. Sorry guys!

Who should be responsible for a company’s engagement in social media?
Another question at the panel was the very corporate question who should be responsible of social media in a hospitality company: The Ceo? The custom care department? The marketing or the PR types? and a whole lot more answers came along. My answer was very simple: “It should be the CEO, because In Real Life he is already the face of the company, so why not be same In Virtual Life? I pointed to Bill Marriott as an example who does a very good job at this. I then also stated that if the CEO would have not enough time to do all himself, because actually being engaged in social media means being 24/7 engaged in social media, he should delegate. My point is that if a CEO doesn’t trust his coworkers to engage in social media, then there is something wrong with his organization: “How can a hotelier trust his coworkers to receive a guest in his hotel and not trust them to engage with past, present or future guests via social media?”

What makes the circle round
And now comes the funny part. During a San Francisco EyeforTravel conference about Social Media in Travel there was a Marriott case made available which was put together by the Marriott Social media team… to my huge surprise they quoted this tweet of March 15, 20009 of me :

read-bill-marriott-blog

Which I posted in March 2009 about in What should Hotel Owners Know about Social Media
Lessons learned:
Even the big man (Bill Marriott) sometimes listens to the small guy (Happy Hotelier)…otherwise they would not have used this picture which they obviously pinched from this blog, because now the screen capture of the tweet shows date and time and another backgroung and not posted 13  minutes ago. Moreover, even the small guy can become a (small) authority on social media simply by blogging, engaging in social media and being part of conferences and sometimes giving a presentation which forces him to rethink his activities from time to time.
Credit
A big thank you to Graham Robertson (@Grayum_ian) of  Project: Wander who pointed me to the Marriott Case at Eyefortravel. If you’re interested in the case study, you can dowbload it for free at Eye For Travel. It’s really worthwhile a read about the blogger who doesn’t blog.

DePhoCussing from ITB 2010 (1)

I have many impressions to share from the PhoCusWright Travel Bloggers Summit at ITB Berlin.

For a change I will start with my last impression: I was interviewed for the Austrian Tourism Blog.

Thought of posting it first and adding more later when I’ve sorted the lot.

The interview was made by Rainer Edlinger of Edei’s Blog Recently Rainer was promoted to Hauptmann of the Zell am See Tourism office.

A Blog is a Hotelier’s Best Friend

A Blog Is A Hotelier’s Best Friend

View more presentations by me at Slideshare.

As promised: My presentation for the Hotel Marketing Conference of March 25, 2010. For more presentations at the conference see their Hotel Website Marketing Blog