Chris Pearson and Matt Mullenweg have hardly communicated with one another in the last five years, but they are ideological enemies. They have very strong personalities and unshakable beliefs on business and software. This is a story of their dispute, their idealism, and the implications it will have on the WordPress project.
This is a preview of the first part of my upcoming article on Thesis, Automattic, and WordPress. Chris Pearson and Matt Mullenweg have hardly communicated with one another in the last five years, but they are ideological enemies. They are both wealthy individuals thanks to their online endeavors, with very strong personalities and unshakable beliefs…
Mike Jolley has agreed to terms to sell WP Job Manager to Automattic. Mike is already joining Automattic after the WooThemes acquisition — under his role as WooCommerce lead developer — and the sale of WP Job Manager is in part due to Automattic’s rules for employee side projects.
In a provocative article on WP Tavern titled “Envato Continues to Rake in the Cash from WordPress Themes Packaged as Complete Website Solutions”, Sarah Gooding slams Envato for their role in what I’ll call the “big theme” market. Envato theme authors are making large sums of cash by selling themes that are packaged as complete solutions…
There has been a lot of talk lately around putting commercial plugin code on public Github repos. #thankspippin. Seriously, thanks. This is a good conversation to have. GravityView is the latest plugin to make this change. I’m pleased to see it. However, in the WP Tavern article about it, it’s cited as a “business model”…
There’s a popular WordPress vulnerability scanner called WPScan. To validate its popularity: it has over 1,800 commits, 750 stars, and 165 forks on Github. The scanner is used by a lot of security folks, as well as other service and product vendors. The plugin has historically been split license, sort-of, between GPL and some kind…
This week, the iThemes launched “BackupBuddy Gold” – a new pricing tier for their BackupBuddy plugin. They already had a $150 tier, which included a license to use the plugin on unlimited sites, as well as support and updates for one year. The only difference with the Gold tier (currently priced at $297) is that it includes lifetime…
AutoDesk is an enormous company. Publicly traded on the Nasdaq, they have a market cap just under $12 Billion. You may have heard of AutoCAD, the thirty year old drafting software that’s an absolute titan in a broad range of industries. And they’ve just acquired Creative Market, a digital marketplace that’s gotten a lot of…
This past weekend, I co-organized WordCamp Birmingham, or WP Y’all, and a couple of our (many) taglines were “In Open Source We Trust” and “Cheers to the GPL.” So naturally we toasted the GPL at the after party. Going through all of the pictures and seeing our toast, I thought about it some more and…
Plugins are the new black in WordPress site development, and picking out the perfect plugins for your site can quickly become overwhelming. The WordPress.org plugin repository hosts over 26,000 plugins and the plugin forum contains over 1.3 million posts. Check out this plugin wordcloud – what stands out amongst the rest? With so many plugins…
I guess we can call it a trend now. For the second time in as many weeks, a WordCamp has been “forked”. WordCamp Phoenix has been a tremendously popular event in past years. I know at least one year they had over 600 attendees. Today, WP Weekend Phoenix launched as a new conference for WordPress,…
Creative Market hit the scene pretty quickly earlier this year as a 100% GPL theme marketplace. Now, WooCommerce has announced that they have made some of their themes available on Creative Market.
We’re happy to announce today that authors on ThemeForest and CodeCanyon can now choose to license their WordPress items through a 100% GPL option. To help us launch this new feature, we’re excited to have one of the most well known and respected theme outfits joining ThemeForest’s ever growing library — WooThemes!
You’re probably familiar the GPL controversy of late between WordCamps and Envato. Well, this solves that. After looking at author survey results, Envato is going to offer an option for authors to choose a 100% GPL license. The survey results are pretty interesting, so check out the speaker deck linked in the Envato post. I’m…
Genericons is a 100% GPL icon font by Automattic. It’s in use with twenty thirteen, and I’m excited about it. It looks like a great option for most themes that need fairly few, simple icons. I’ll be bundling this with my base theme.
It was brought up recently that a couple of theme shops were selling commercial themes on both Theme Forest and WordPress.com. In light of recent GPL Drama, that caused some confusion about licensing allowances. StudioPress almost immediately took their themes off of Theme Forest, but Obox has not. Obox intends to sell with a 100%…
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