News for the WordPress community: Small Potato has put WPdesigner up for sale. SP is a very talented designer and has contributed much to the WordPress world over the last couple of years. Enjoy your holiday SP!
The story continues.
For those who my have missed it, Matt Mullenweg has posted an essay on Weblog Tools Collection discussing the merits of sponsored themes. There is also a WordPress Idea about the same.
I have been doing my best to stay away from the discussion, when I don’t have anything new or original to contribute I prefer to reign in my typing finger. I have noticed that now Matt Cutts has joined in the discussion themes.wordpress.net have stopped selling sponsored links in the sidebar… what was cool yesterday is the devils work today :S
Anyway, the reason I am posting is because I have a hypothetical question, and I am wondering if anyone has an answer. This question applies whether or not WordPress continue to allow sponsored links in themes submitted to the themeviewer or not.
No-one at WordPress is refuting the right of the theme designer to put a link back to their site in the theme. I commented on Matt Cutts’ blog asking him his opinion on designer links, whether they should be nofollowed or if they are legitimate, but so far I have no answer. Matt C’s comments so far appear to relate to paid links only, paid as in $ not as in beer.
If a company (for this example, lets say a travel company called ‘Happy Travel’) has a blog about travel deals with a unique theme that has been custom designed for them by a talented young designer called ‘Tom Thumb’ who works for a web design company called ‘Cool Designs’. After a while the altruistic management at Happy Travel decide to release the theme to the public through the themeviewer and the codex. Who gets the link?
Answers on a postcard please…
Do You feel Vulnerable?
I feel it is my duty to highlight some security vulnerabilities related to WordPress themes. When you upload a WordPress theme to your webserver you are uploading not just a benign template, but a PHP program which can contain code that performs pretty much anything. (more…)
I come from a marketing background – originally I fell in love with WordPress because it was so quick and easy to create a WordPress website, just a few clicks in cPanel and fantastico and it is all done for you. Even better, the content writers I employed could get to grips with the WP dashboard easily, and could write straight into the site – the method I employed before WP was to have the writers email me articles and I would manually create pages in Dreamweaver. Thinking about it now, I can’t believe that method used to be profitable! (more…)
If you are as old as me and remember the Commodore 64 and VIC 20 you might want to check this theme out. Pretty amazing!
The theme was created by Rod McFarland, I can’t find a link to his own blog, so here is a link to the theme’s page on themeviewer.