HeadsetOptions Web Design, SEO, WordPress, Etcetra

The “Smear Campaign” has started. No we are not talking about the US presidential race, we are talking CMS! Have you visited Planet WordPress lately? For a new comer, it will look more like a Movable Type blog than WordPress, and if that were not enough, the MT folks can’t seem to keep their egos in their pants and try endlessly to add fuel to the fire.

For the sake of history, here’s how the events unfolded.
First there was Movable Type
For what it is worth, Movable Type is responsible for the popularity of WordPress. The licensing debacle of MT resulted in defectors opting …

WordPress is turning 5 today, along the way, a whole lot of goodies were added and WordPress, which started as a simple blogging aid is now on the verge of becoming a full blown CMS. Old timers might remember the b2 PHP file hacks, and the “CSS edit only” theme by none other than Matthew Mullenweg!
WordPress has indeed come a long way, and I am proud to be a very small part of it.

Let me say it for the millionth time “content is king” and we all know that, don’t we?

Since content is the most important part of a site, your WordPress powered theme must emphasis on its presentation. Most cookie cutter themes come with a post list that runs based on the time your posts were published, in other words a chronological list of posts irrespective of its importance. Let’s face it, not all posts are created equal. Some posts are special, some are important and then some not quite so. Why then should all posts get the same treatment?

Magazine styled themes do a fine job of addressing this by introducing the featured …

Al might think he “invented the internet“, but he sure failed to upgrade his WordPress CMS, which resulted in negative publicity for the best open CMS out there. His site was powered by version 2.0.4, which as Matt points out, was released a good 16 months ago, and even beats the version I was running a few weeks ago, with my own patch nonetheless. My excuse, I did not invent the Internet!

I guess folks at WordPress.com start talking about copyright violation only when it hits home. When we cried foul about WordPress themers ripping our work and calling it their own, no one cared except Thomas (and Lorelle).

The reality is, you can’t stop people from stealing content or code, it pinches those of us on the receiving end and it sucks. Google can de-index a few sites, but many more will pop-up.

Although Google is the search engine leader, how many …

So we are not trying to wait it out or anything like that, we are just as sick of it as y’all are so let’s get this thing done and over with. Today will not go down in history as the day WordPress died; in fact it’s the opposite. In my opinion, WordPress is the best open source CMS out there, and can remain that way if we all took the chill pill and got our acts together.

Talking about acts, here’s a confession to add for your weekend gossip, Mark and I have lived a dual life for the past 4 months on WordPress both as designers and as the moderator of themes.wordpress.net, yes we were cleaning out the mess and doing the dirty job while Matt and Mark (Gosh) were busy smearing us with the tar of being the bad guys. But as Matt would thanklessly say, “no one asked us to do it”, we volunteered!

So why are we only coming out now? We do not seek attention, but this might be the best opportunity to bring to the attention of the WP communities some of the challenges we are facing today that must be addressed and could very well be prevented when Matt takes over the themes repository completely (as widely speculated) for whatever the reason. Think of this as the “Moderators” public service announcement. But before we go, I would like to clear the air and talk a little about why and how we got here in the first place.