Theme bliss
When you really want to give something away for free (like my Plain Vanilla theme for WordPress, for example), what license should I use? At the time of the competition, the requirement was to have a GPL. Jason wrote to me to say that he wanted to know if he could use it under a BSD license and it’s different from GPL. Now, I’m thinking of changing licensed under GPL to Free for all, and use at will.
Other than the obvious little tag about the creator that shows up only in the Admin console, there’s only one tiny commented line at the bottom (it’s visible only if you view source) in my set of theme files (easily removable, if you don’t want it there). It’s heartening to see many, many of them uncomment that line, so that it shows up in their sidebar, and many more have gone and added a detailed attribution linking my site back (some of which I discover via Technorati). Sometimes, Sneha and I sit back and look at some of the websites that are based on Plain Vanilla and how users have modified them to suit to their taste. It’s lovely.
Some stats: Plain Vanilla has been downloaded over a thousand times from this site alone. I don’t know about how many times from Alex King’s theme competition site. Oh, the joy of sharing.
Among other things, I’m trying to get a package including the archives page, and the custom error page as the guys mentioned in one of my previous post comments. I also have a few background images where the sidebar is colored, and may radically change the way your blog might look. All one needs to do is change the filename of the background image in the style.css file. I’ll package them and release them shortly.
I’m also trying to upload this theme to SVN based WP-Themes.org without luck. I don’t have the time to rtfm. I have Tortoise SVN client for Windows, but in the limited time I tried, I couldn’t upload the theme files (I’ve got a login provided by Matt). Is this how it works?
Chetan, its a really lovely theme.. !! Looks so neat.. so clean.. gives some sort of sophisticated look!!
Thanks for sharing!!
Apr 13, 05 at 14:32Manpreet, I’m really glad that a lot of people love this theme. My first real contribution under GPL and it turned out really appreciated. I’m just happy about it
Apr 14, 05 at 23:06